So I have openSUSE tumbleweed installed on a VMware 6.5 ESXi host, and the setup was easy and is apparently very stable (been running about a week). However, I have this very annoying issue I cannot seem to resolve where a) the screen resolution will not go higher than 1360x768 and b) even if I set it at 1360x768, it always reverts back to 638x479 each time I open the console. I have installed many other Linux guest OS’s on ESXi, and none of them have these issues - installed Ubuntu, Mint, Red Hat, CentOS, etc.
I understand openSUSE and VMware might not be the best setup, I’ve seen many topics on VMs tell the OP to just use a different VM host like Virtualbox - however my company is heavily invested in VMware, and it would be nice to continue utilizing that technology.
How are you setting your screen resolution?
And, what Desktop are you running?
Have you explored xrandr probing and options?
If you’re not familiar with using the command line, I’ve installed and used arandr with great success.
Going into System Settings > Display and Monitor > Displays > setting the resolution in there
I’m sorry, I am dumb for not including this - I’m using KDE on tumbleweed, which I believe is 5.9.something
I am not familiar with xrandr, but I’m Googling now lol. Also, I’m not as well versed with SUSE command line, but I have been using terminal in Ubuntu-based distro’s for years
On my Workstation 12.5, you can’t set VMware resolutions higher than 1360x768.
Although I don’t usually explore beyond what xrandr offers, my impression is that you can test unsupported settings or at least probe for settings that might not be offered by the Desktop, of course you’re then moving into YMMV territory.
To the OP,
xrandr was and still is “the” basic way to probe and set display settings from the CLI. When all else in the Desktop fails, this has always been the way to modify Display settings.
(I only have one monitor that has a resolution of 1280x1024 btw)
If that’s set to “Use host settings for monitors”, you will only get what your (host) monitor supports of course.
I didn’t actually test whether this works though…
Although I don’t usually explore beyond what xrandr offers, my impression is that you can test unsupported settings or at least probe for settings that might not be offered by the Desktop, of course you’re then moving into YMMV territory.
No.
Actually the desktop (KDE at least) does get its list of resolutions from XRANDR (the X protocol, not the CLI tool, but the CLI tool uses the same protocol too).
It is possible to add custom resolutions via xrandr (the CLI tool) though, or via modelines in the Xorg configuration.
But that shouldn’t be necessary to get a higher resolution than 1360x768 in vmware I think.
FWIW,
I ran the following test on a 42.2/KDE…
In the VMware Guest settings, the maximum display setting was set to 3840x2160.
From within KDE, “Configure Desktop” Display setting detected only a maximum of 2500x1600.
Installed arandr and detected only same max resolution.
Since 2500x1600 is the max resolution of WXBA, that would appear to be the type of driver installed (despite documentation saying it’s only SVGA so the documentation must never have been updated). See the following table for max resolutions of various drivers
One can still attempt to experiment by disabling the virtualized display hardware setting in the Guest vmx file as follows. Once disabled, the virtualized hardware is no longer passed to the OS so is no longer a limitation to what you might want to try.
