Heavy Insight
Tuesday, April 19, 2005
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:
- I used the auto protocol for my mouse
- I did turn on 3 button emulation
- I took the default path to the mouse device
- I said I was running a generic 101-key PC keyboard
- My country is U.S. English
- I took the default variant
- I did not select any additional XKB options
- 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
- I also said my vertical sync rate was option 1 50-70
- I said my monitor defination was "vmware"
- I looked at the card database and select the video card called VMWARE
- Not knowing what to select I said my card had 64KB of video ram
- Again I used "vmware" as the name for my card
- I took the default mode definations
- I defaulted to 24 bit color
- 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
