HowTo: Change VMWare Player Guest OS Display Resolution

Here is one useful bit for anyone running, or thinking of running, a local test/development environment under VMWare Player version 2.0 with a guest OS Linux install.

I’ll assume you have installed VMWare Player and a VMWare Appliance similar to CentOS v5. After which, by default, the resolution will be limited to modes “800×600″ and “640×480″.

Here is how you fix that problem…

Step 1: Install X and GNOME, if not already present.
yum groupinstall "X Window System" "GNOME Desktop Environment"
[Note: to install KDE, substitute the "GNOME..." string with "KDE (K Desktop Environment)"]

Step 2: Edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf

You should already have…

Section "Device"
Identifier "Videocard0"
Driver "vmware"
EndSection

Add the following “monitor” section…

Section "Monitor"
Identifier "Monitor0"
HorizSync 1.0 - 10000.0
VertRefresh 1.0 - 10000.0
EndSection

Modify the existing “Screen” section…
Note to replace the following “1600×1200″ string with the highest resolution your monitor can handle.

Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen0"
Device "Videocard0"
Monitor "Monitor0"
DefaultDepth 24
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 24
Modes "1600x1200" "800x600" "640x480"
EndSubSection
EndSection

Step 3: Start X
startx

2 Responses to “HowTo: Change VMWare Player Guest OS Display Resolution”


  1. 1 admin

    Jst as a note…

    To install the vmware-tools pkg under Ubuntu 7.04

    sudo apt-get install build-essential

    sudo apt-get install linux-headers-`uname -r`

    Unpack vmware-tools pkg and sudo ./vmware-install.pl

    Run ‘/usr/bin/vmware-toolbox &’ to start the tools.

  2. 2 F. Bochicchio

    I did something similar. Guest OS is RHEL 4, on Windows XP with WMWare Player. I used the RHEL config tools to change X resolution and it works, if I log as superuser. If I log with a different user, it seems that the resolution change fail and then the output video is scrambled … it looks like some permission problem but I cant’t find it. I tried adding the normal user to all defined grups (admin, root, tty, … ) but with no success …

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