I have a headless CentOS Serverguest running in VirtualBox. The window is small, how increase size?

I am running CentOS Server as a pure command-line interface. It runs in a very small window, which makes it hard to see print outs of files and commands. Is there a way to increase the size?

:slight_smile:

With difficulty, hopefully not much.
First, you should probably ask this question in a CentOS forum for best responses.

Assuming you are describing the Guest display resolution and not the Host’s display… In other words, in the first case your Guest might appear as 800x600 or 1024x760 but in the latter the Guest might display as a very large resolution (eg 1600x900) but compacted into a tiny window on the Host.

In general…
When you’re running without a Desktop, typically your video display is defined by GRUB (or other bootloader).
With today’s OS (subject to change far in the past and into the future), this generally means that the VESA driver is used, and within the typical available display resolutions GRUB can define a specific “default” setting.

Note that this is very different than if you’re running a Desktop. If you run even a minimal Desktop then a different, likely more capable video driver is loaded (most likely a special VBox driver) and you would then configure your display setting using a Desktop tool. So, if you don’t mind running at least a very minimal Desktop changing display resolution could be much easier and with a better result.

TSU

If it’s command line only, why not just ssh into the guest using your terminal emulator of choice?

I turned off root access via SSH (a basic user can still ssh though) and I’m frequently doing “root” things in the interface.

You can log in using a regular user and then become root.

Well now I feel dumb.

That’s controlled by policy.
Doesn’t come to mind immediately how, but it’s SOP hardening to deny remote Users the ability to su or sudo.

TSU

OK, so if I implement that policy, how would I then increase the size of the VirtualBox window since that would be the only one I can use with root?