virtualbox.org

I am running Windows XP as a guest on my Ubuntu Gutsy laptop. My laptop is widescreen (1280x800) but XP doesn't list that as a choice for display settings.... trying to install my graphics driver (HP) didn't work because it doesn't recognize my "hardware."

How do I make it give me my resolution!? 1024x768 is sooooo 1998.

Hi, check out the thread link below. Same issue with a Windows 2K guest, and I'm sure the same solution will work. Rather than trying to adjust the screen / window size by adjusting the guest machine settings, you need to approach it the other way, ie force the host to increase the window size in which VirtualBox runs! Maybe then the guest settings also need adjusting manually, but they seem to do it automatically.

http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?t=6933

There's a great new solution to the screen size problem since the release of version 1.6.2.

It's a new VBoxManage command, explained in the Help/ User Manual at section 9.12 under the heading "Configuring the maximum resolution of guests when using the graphical frontend".

As the default screen resolution option was unsatisfactory for me, I found by trial and error that the perfect resolution for a Guest inside my Host's desktop (with a 19 inch LCD) is 1272 x 920. So in the HOST system, I shut down VirtualBox, then opened a terminal and typed:

VBoxManage setextradata global GUI/MaxGuestResolution 1272,920

This worked perfectly. Now when I run any guest machine in Virtualbox, the guest immediately opens to my desired screen size and works consistently time after time. Absolutely no adjustments are required inside the guest machine's settings.

Thanks to Frank Mehnert from Sun, Germany, who first mentioned this command in the forums.

ok, I tried this in order to get a game to run in VirtualBox on WinXP because apparently the game checks to see if the screen is running at 1024x768 and I always have it running at some sort of wierd drag size of like 1128x723 or such. Note that the game is called 'Strategic Command' and is not very challenging graphically, so I figured it would probably work.

So I used this command; VBoxManage setextradata global GUI/MaxGuestResolution 1024,768

And now VirtualBox hangs every time I start it. I tried changing it to 1440x900 and just leaving it blank, still hung. I tried removing it from the Library/VirtualBox.xml file. I tried renaming the Virtualbox.xml file to have the thing hopefully remake it correctly... nothing works and VirtualBox hangs everytime I run it... sigh..

Any help?

The resolution thing is saved in the VM XML file, so changing VirtualBox.xml won't work, you have to modify machine.xml, where machine is the name of the VM. You can set a resolution in the display settings of the OS, then in the Machine menu disable automatic resizing. That should keep the VM at 1024 x 768.

Well, that didn't work because the WinXP.xml file has only two spots where display is even mentioned and neither one mentions the resolution.

However, what DID work was rebooting OS X and restarting VirtualBox and then I worked around the game buy running it in full screen mode and setting the resolution to 1024x768 in WinXP.

Thanks for the help, even if it didn't lead to a solution directly.