Adjust resolution in xfce4 virtualbox guest guest

Question

I have Virtualbox 4.1.2_ubuntur3859 installed on an Ubuntu 11.10 host, running a guest ubuntu server 10.04 with xfce4 and xorg installed with no-install-recommends.

I have installed guest additions, but the maximum resolution in the display settings is 800x600.

I have read related questions:

• How to change resolution of the VirtualBox (Ubuntu guest and host)?
• Higher screen resolution in VirtualBox?
• Upgrading VirtualBox 3.2.10 breaks my guest Ubuntu screen resolution
• Ubuntu as guest OS (with Vista host) stuck at 800x600 resolution

but none contain the solution to my issue.

Am I missing any particular packages that would allow me to change resolution? I would like to keep the machine as small as possible.

Solution

After having installed the Guest Additions (which involves mounting of the Guest Additions iso in the guest OS and running the installation script as root) we are able to change the virtual screen resolution either by the Display Settings

or, when Auto-Resize Guest Display (Host + G) was enabled from View menu in the Virtual Box Manager, by dragging the guest OS windows with the mouse to the desired size (this resulted in the odd resolution 1920 x 1034 depicted here).

To find out if the virtual graphic adapter from guest additions was loaded we can in the guest OS issue

lspci | grep VGA

This should give us

VGA compatible controller: InnoTek Systemberatung GmbH VirtualBox Graphics Adapter

If that is not the case you my want to try installing the guest additions again. You may also want to update your installation of Virtual Box on the host.

Comments

[user12889]

That's lspci not lspsci.

[Paul]

My problem was that my VM only had 8 MB of video RAM. Boosting this to 128 unlocked higher resolutions, including one corresponding to the window size.