I’ve been enjoying Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich on my Samsung Epic 4g thanks to CyanogenMod 9. Since I’ve installed, I’ve had one nagging issue. My phone would only rotate to landscape if I opened the keyboard. Recently I put a car mount in for my phone, and for GPS, it would be handy to have rotation working properly. Well, I did some looking around and finally got it all figured out. Here’s what I had to do to fix everything.

First up, there are 3 different places to control rotation!

System Settings -> Launcher -> General

System Settings -> Display

System Settings -> Accessibility

My first bit of advice would be to try various combinations of these. See if having 1, 2, or all 3 of these options on or off fixes things. It didn’t work for me, so here’s what’s next.

Go here, and grab the multiboot .tar.bz2 file. On your computer, use something like winrar to unzip it. You should end up with a folder named multiboot. Put the multiboot folder onto your SD card, so you end up with /sdcard/multiboot.

Reboot into recovery and select install from zip. Navigate to:

multiboot -> EL30 -> boot_EL30.zip and install.

The cool thing here, this ROM will then act as if it’s installed, but it ain’t! This puts us in to Gingerbread to do some work, but the next time you boot your phone, you will be back to your normal OS. Now be patient! You are booting an entire OS from the SD card. It’s sloooow. It took several minutes for this to boot up for me. And everything you do on the phone will have some serious lag. Take your time!

Now that you are booted in to EL30, head over to Settings -> Display and calibrate your sensor. I did it 3 times in a row just to be sure! While I was i9n Gingerbread, I took the opportunity to go to Settings -> About phone, and in updates I updated my profile, and my PRL. Then I rebooted and I was back in CyanogenMod9 ICS. I checked all 3 rotation settings in ICS to on (the ones I described earlier), and everything worked perfectly!

Hopefully this works for you too if you are having any issues!