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#1 2011-09-20 18:02:41

omelette
Member
Registered: 2011-09-16
Posts: 17

[Solved] Virtualbox Guest - how do I change resolution?

Hi.  I have an installed & working Arch-guest on Virtualbox as per Arch's VB-Wiki, with the correct screen-resolution as well!  My 'problem' is that I tried experimenting with VB's available resolutions by way of the VBoxManage command;

VBoxManage controlvm "Arch Linux" setvideomodehint 800 600 32

- only to find that Bash tells me that the command is not found.  This implies that Guest additions are not installed, at least fully!  Initially, I tried to install Guest-additions the VB-recommended way, namely letting it compile its modules itself, but this failed despite having also installed the kernel-headers.  Then I found Arch's VB-wiki that recommended installing guest-additions via Pacman.  This seemed a tiny download but I figured it had found the already-downloaded guest-additions ISO and installed it - anyway, whatever it did, Virtual-Arch ran fine afterwards!

But no VBoxManage command - does the Arch-way of installing guest-additions not install everything?

Last edited by omelette (2011-09-20 20:49:13)

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#2 2011-09-20 19:38:33

jamesbond007
Member
From: Germany
Registered: 2009-06-14
Posts: 150

Re: [Solved] Virtualbox Guest - how do I change resolution?

AFAIK VBoxManage is run on the host system, not inside the virtual machine (guest OS).

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#3 2011-09-20 20:34:23

omelette
Member
Registered: 2011-09-16
Posts: 17

Re: [Solved] Virtualbox Guest - how do I change resolution?

Damn, that didn't even occur to me!  Thanks for pointing it out.

Still no joy though - when I execute the above command I am informed that no such registered VM was found.  worse, when I try 'VBoxManage list vms' or 'VBoxManage list runningvms' it fails to list anything!  Somethings not right!

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#4 2011-09-20 20:46:13

olive
Member
From: Belgium
Registered: 2008-06-22
Posts: 1,490

Re: [Solved] Virtualbox Guest - how do I change resolution?

If you have installed the archlinux correctly, you have to:

modprobe vboxguest
modprobe vboxsf
modprobe vboxvideo
/usr/bin/VBoxService

and then as a normal user after launching X:

 /usr/bin/VBoxClient-all 

You might also have to configure xorg.conf (but normally it should works without xorg.conf at all).

vboxmanage is run from the host not the guest. But if all is correctly installed, you should just be able to resize the virtualbox windows and archlinux will adjust automatically. You could also use xrandr from archlinux.

Last edited by olive (2011-09-20 20:48:16)

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#5 2011-09-20 20:48:27

omelette
Member
Registered: 2011-09-16
Posts: 17

Re: [Solved] Virtualbox Guest - how do I change resolution?

More egg-on-face & another screw-up on my part - out of habit, I was executing the command as root.  It works fine as a user. Thanks guys.  Marked as 'solved'.

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