Widescreen resolution in VMWare guest on Linux host

Posted on September 30, 2007 by gcarrillo

My laptop, on which I run Ubuntu, has a native resolution of 1680×1050. I created a Windows guest in VMWare Server, but found that this widescreen resolution was not supported. I found the answer in this forum post; run:

$ vi /var/lib/vmware-server/Virtual Machines/Windows XP Home Edition/Windows XP Home Edition.vmx

and enter the lines:

svga.maxWidth = "1680"
svga.maxHeight = "1050"

Filed under: Linux(Ubuntu) | Tagged:

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16 Responses

  1. Tom, on October 19th, 2007 at 7:54 pm Said:

    I upgraded to Ubuntu 7.10 and reinstalled everything and was unable to get the widescreen resolution I had while running VMware under Ubuntu 7.04. Wasn’t sure why just select the resolution I had before but this was a great fix. Worked perfectly. Thanks.

  2. Tom, on October 19th, 2007 at 8:02 pm Said:

    Left the last response without reading what I wrote. Wasn’t sure why I wasn’t able to select the correct resolution in Windows XP Professional but setting these values in the vmx file fixed the issue. My max resolution is 1680×1050 (Samsung SyncMaster 225BW) but I dont like keeping vmware in fullscreen so I changed it to 1668×985 so that it would fit in the quick switch view perfectly.

  3. gcarrillo, on October 21st, 2007 at 3:19 pm Said:

    Cool, I’m glad the post helped you out!

  4. Steve, on November 23rd, 2007 at 4:45 pm Said:

    That works great for me w/ a Windows guest but doesn’t seem to do the same trick w/ a Linux guest (both under Ubuntu 7.10 & VM Server 1.0.4 build-56528).

    In this case the Linux guest is the “official” Backtrack2 appliance available from the VM Appliance site.

    Any ideas for Linux guests?

    Thanks!

  5. Aaron K, on February 1st, 2008 at 11:12 pm Said:

    I am running a XP VM on a Dell D800 [ Ubuntu 7.10 ] with VMWare Server.

    Adding those two lines worked perfectly for me to get the resolution 1280 X 800.

    Thanks so much!

  6. Ian, on February 2nd, 2008 at 4:35 pm Said:

    Worked great at 1440 x 900 on my thinkpad z61t: ubuntu with VMware server.
    Note that the quotes in the 2nd line above are the wrong characters and caused an error when I copied and pasted:
    svga.maxWidth = “1680″
    svga.maxHeight = “1050″
    it should be
    svga.maxWidth = “1680″
    svga.maxHeight = “1050″

  7. Ian, on February 2nd, 2008 at 5:31 pm Said:

    Sorry about the seemingly meaningless comment about the quotes.
    It seems wordpress changes the quote characters automatically from what the necessary plain quotation marks to be to the slanted quotes that cause the error.

  8. Matt, on February 11th, 2008 at 1:20 am Said:

    I’d also like to point out lan’s proposed correction is also wrong. I copied and pasted his corrected values, but those also failed. I erased it and manually typed the values in and it worked fine.

    Thanks for this fix!!

  9. Matt, on February 11th, 2008 at 1:28 am Said:

    if you are running a 1680×1050 res monitor and guest, tell vmware to auto-adjust the guest os. if you are running them both at the same resolution you get the “move guest os’s screen” arrows on the x and y axis. vmware will shrink the desktop just enough to make them go away. also, install the vmware tools thing also, i can use one side of my compiz desktop as windows, and it works _awesome_

  10. gcarrillo, on February 28th, 2008 at 11:02 am Said:

    I guess I didn’t get the notifications of these above replies, so I had no idea people were discussing the post. Thanks to those who pointed out the problems and provided the fix.

  12. Alejandro, on August 3rd, 2008 at 7:55 pm Said:

    Works on Gentoo and VMWare-Workstation 5.5.7 build-91707.

    Thanks :D

  13. John, on September 23rd, 2008 at 7:20 am Said:

    Awesome!

    added these two lines to my .vmx file as you said and now my guest o/s works great full-screen, thank god for that!

    svga.maxWidth = “1280″
    svga.maxHeight = “800″

    ;-)

  14. Spider, on January 23rd, 2009 at 10:31 am Said:

    Oh o ho! very nice site!t

  15. Maggy, on February 18th, 2009 at 4:59 am Said:

    Your site is very interesting and useful+

  16. Craig, on April 5th, 2009 at 10:18 pm Said:

    Thanks for the tip! :)

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