VmWare 5.0, Solaris 10 x86, and Resolution > 800x600
For reasons that we shall not know (but I suspect are related to some evil consipricy involving EMC), VMWARE treats Solaris 10 x86 as an experimental OS. As such, you are limited to a basic reoslution of 800x600, unless you do this little trick I learned.

I am running VMWARE Workstation 5 and Solaris 10 x86 03/05. Once I have the install completed, you can run the /usr/X11/bin/xorgconfig command to manually set vmware to use a larger than 800x600 screen size for Solaris 10.

if you are not already running the Xorg server (as opposed to the old school Xsun server), I suggest you make this switch. I'm sure there is some elegant way to just poof make the change, but since I'm not that smart, sys-unconfig does the trick nicely.

Once you are up and running on the Xorg windows server, fire up a terminal session and run xorgconfig. Here are the highlights:

1. I used the auto protocol for my mouse
2. I did turn on 3 button emulation
3. I took the default path to the mouse device
4. I said I was running a generic 101-key PC keyboard
5. My country is U.S. English
6. I took the default variant
7. I did not select any additional XKB options
8. Now for the monitor. I have a super fancy display that is capable of running 1280x1024. Since this is VMWARE and I wanted some realestate around my vmware window, I chose a size less than 1280x1024. For me I selected: 31.5 - 57.0: High Frequency SVGA, 1024x768 @ 70Hz
9. I also said my vertical sync rate was option 1 50-70
10. I said my monitor defination was "vmware"
11. I looked at the card database and select the video card called VMWARE
12. Not knowing what to select I said my card had 64KB of video ram
13. Again I used "vmware" as the name for my card
14. I took the default mode definations
15. I defaulted to 24 bit color
16. and I wrote the new /etc/X11/xorg.conf file

If you were logged in to the console via vmware and did all that in the graphical session, you need to log off - that will trigger a restart of the Xorg server and it will at that time reread the configuration and switch to the new higher resolution. VMWARE 5 seems to automagically adjust to the new graphical configuration - and all is good.

-jason

- posted by Jason @ 9:44 PM