I can't figure out what the icon between my settings and lock-screen icon in Gnome3 is supposed to do.
It has two states, locked and unlocked, but it's not the lock screen. When I click it, it toggles its status.
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Could it be the touchpad? Is there any popup if you hover over it? When is this shown? What is this panel called? Not all of us use gnome. – terdon♦ May 30 '15 at 10:10
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That button locks/unlocks screen orientation on devices that can detect which way they are held - usually touchscreen devices - see Screen orientation section on the gnome wiki touchscreen page: Easy ability to temporarily disable and enable auto-rotation (rotation lock).
It was introduced a couple of years ago: Add an orientation lock action button. The icon used is rotation-locked-symbolic and it's counterpart is rotation-allowed-symbolic. They're under /usr/share/icons/Adwaita/scalable/status and they're both part of the symbolic icons set.
On some systems with hard disk accelerometers that button appears even if your device doesn't support screen orientation detection. If that's the case you can disable the gnome-settings-daemon plugin via gsettings:
gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.orientation active false
answered May 30 '15 at 12:03
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Does disabling gsettings remove that icon from the top right part of the screen? – codezombie Jan 13 '17 at 12:09
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1@JasonStack - sorry, I don't know... and I cannot test as I got a new laptop that has no accelerometer/touch screen... – don_crissti Jan 13 '17 at 12:13
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I also had to blacklist the
hp_accelmodule, otherwise the button would come back within a few seconds after system has started. – Alexander Revo Feb 6 '17 at 10:03 -
This key no longer seems to exist. I did find org.gnome.settings-daemon.peripherals.touchscreen orientation-lock=true but the ability to disable orientation changes is gone in Fedora 26. – Steeve McCauley Oct 11 '17 at 13:00
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@SteeveMcCauley - yep, they've removed the ability to start/stop individual plugins (see 1st attachment here) - seems like part of some major overhaul but I have no time to delve into this right now (and as I said above I no longer have the hardware to test it anyway...) – don_crissti Oct 11 '17 at 18:42
