Getting Rotation to work without black strip on screen

[comcy]

Hello All,

I have seen this problem talked about all over the net (not so often 'cause not everyone's got 2+ monitors and want's to rotate 'em). But I have yet to see an actual solution, other than blind luck (upgrading a driver. etc)

I am running dual Radeon 2400HD Pros (DVI), a (singular) Samsung SyncMaster 743n (RGB), xorg-x-11-7.4, xorg-server-1.5.2, xf86-video-ati on Gentoo-2.6.27r7.

Obvious first question: Why xf86 on an HD card? - 'cause the even the latest radeonhd driver does not give me rotation options after following install instructions. It flat fails.

Second, less obvious question: Did you try the ATI driver? Yes, Cat 9.1. Total failure. Black screen. Never got to X login.

so, xf86 (vanilla radeon) works, to a point. xorg.0.log shows that the driver IS working.

When I select rotate this is what I get:

_______________________
| | |
| | B |
| | L |
| Rotated | A |
| Left | C |
| | K |
| | |
_______________________

And I can't get no relief. I have crashed and burned my whole system trying to get this rotation to work right. I have tried everything I can find on the net, to no avail. So I am turning to you guys for something real.

TIA

P.S. I am currently writing a wiki page: triple monitors for Gentoo, as I have finally figured this out.