Howto change resolution for guest OS in VMware player
I have machine running WXP, but I needed to install Linux Fedora Core 5 as guest OS on it using VMware player. Everything went fine using premade images of FC5 you can download from VMware site. Soon after installing I came to that FC5 is running nice under player however it only offers 640x480 and 800x600 screen resolution, which is not really what is usable for comfortable work.
Searching throught the net I found different "signs" resolution should be possible to increase. Some notes were signing that of some help could be to use VMware Tools to set the resolution inside guest OS. However I was not able to set resolution using linux VMware tools. The only way how to increase resolution for me was to change xorg.conf and replace:
HorizSync 31.5 - 37.9 with HorizSync 1.0 - 10000.0
VertRefresh 50.0 - 70.0 with VertRefresh 1.0 - 10000.0
The highest available resolution is however only 1024x768 which is probably SVGA maximum and I did not get it higher.
In FC6 there is used Xorg autoconfiguration, therefore you have to modify xorg.conf more. I paste here therefore complete xorg.conf.
# Xorg configuration created by pyxf86config
Section "ServerLayout"
Identifier "Default Layout"
Screen 0 "Screen0" 0 0
InputDevice "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
EndSection
Section "Monitor"
Identifier "Monitor0"
HorizSync 1.0 - 10000.0
VertRefresh 1.0 - 10000.0
EndSection
Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Keyboard0"
Driver "kbd"
Option "XkbModel" "pc105"
Option "XkbLayout" "us"
EndSection
Section "Device"
Identifier "Videocard0"
Driver "vmware"
EndSection
Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen0"
Device "Videocard0"
Monitor "Monitor0"
DefaultDepth 24
SubSection "Display"
Depth 24
Modes "1024x768" "800x600"
EndSubSection
EndSection
Great Tip! Thanks! I followed your advise – it works great!
I managed to get my VMware Player up to 1600×1024 by also changing the monitor type to LCD Panel 1280×1024 (under the Gnome desktop System->Administration->Display (hardware tab)).
/Thomas. thank you. that’s great. It works great!!
Thank you very much! Thank you.
I’ve been looking for it for a long time. Really helped.
Faisal - 25.10.2008 22:37
Thank you very much! this helped me a lot! I found that I could not get more than 1024×768 because X did not have the right modeline for the resolution I wanted (1280×800). So I went to:http://xtiming.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/x..
and generated a modeline for 1280×800@60, with all of the other defaults, and put it in the Monitor section after the HorizSync & VertRefresh lines.
RL - 01.08.2009 21:23
Two command line tools in Xorg can help out generating modelines to increase resolution – they are ‘cvt’ and ‘gtf’. Both tools generate modelines compatible with VMWare – chances are these tools are installed on your distro.MDL - 23.04.2010 02:56