Thursday, May 29, 2008

screen resolution for k/ubuntu 8.0.4 hardy heron running on virtualbox

Just fixed a resolution issue for my ubuntu hardy heron guest system running in virtual box (host is kubuntu 8.0.4). The solution is based on this thread.

There are two things I changed in xorg.conf to make it work:

  1. find the video driver device second and add Driver "vboxvideo". see following:
    Section "Device"
    Identifier "Configured Video Device"
    Driver "vboxvideo"
    EndSection

  2. find the screen section and add a display subsection including the modes.
    Section "Screen"
    Identifier "Default Screen"
    Monitor "Configured Monitor"
    Device "Configured Video Device"
    SubSection "Display"
    Modes "1280x800" "1024x768" "800x600"
    EndSubSection
    EndSection
Voila! it works. The only drawback is that the auto-resize guest display function of virtual box doesn't work.

starting vmware server on ubuntu 8.0.4 hardy heron

It wasn't an easy task to get vmware server installed on my kubuntu 8.0.4 box with kernel 2.6.24-17. And after jumping through all those hoops and firing up vmware, I cannot start any virtual machined created. The message I am getting is: Unable to change virtual machine power state: The process exited with an error: End of error message.

After a couple fruitless google searches, I saw a post mentioning about the debug information. Then I went to "edit virtual machine settings" -> "options" -> "advanced" and enabled the "run with debug infor" option. Hah, I got the actual error right away.

It turned out to be that I installed the vmware server with "sudo" and it created a ".vmware" folder in my home folder with root:root permission. Changing the permission fixed my issue.

Ehh.