can't change screen resolution

[dbaker]

Preliminary info: I'm running Kubuntu 13.04 in VirtualBox on my iMac, which is running Mac OS 10.7.3.
1 gb ram and 20 gb storage are allocated to the VM; I have 4 gb ram and 500 gb storage in total.
Kubuntu is using KDE 4.10.5. Apparently my Grub version is "0.97-29ubuntu66" whatever that means.

The virtual machine window is very small (1024 x 768) and I want to make it bigger, so I went to the Display and Monitors section of Kubuntu system settings. Weirdly, there is no option to change the resolution there, which I take it there should be. All is see is this:


And when I click on the 'i' button:


I think for some reason a crucial config file must be missing on my system. I've googled and haven't been able to find anything helpful; one thing I read said you can manually change the resolution by editing a particular system configuration file, but it seems like the file was missing in the first place, and when I made one I didn't have permission to save it anyway and couldn't find a terminal command to allow me to do so.

[SteveRiley]

Click the little box with the four green arrows. You should see a list of available resolutions.

Yes, discoverability in the new tool could be better.

More information by the developer: http://www.afiestas.org/kscreen-1-0-released/
Some bugs have been filed asking for an improved design: https://bugs.kde.org/buglist.cgi?product=KScreen

[dbaker]

Hmm, the maximum resolution available is 1024x768. Why would that be? iMac has a huge screen, there's plenty of room. Dragging the corner of the VM window doesn't seem to help, just puts a heap of blank space around the screen.

[Snowhog]

In a VM, the 'size' of the screen is dependent on the amount of RAM you specified for VM GPU.

[SteveRiley]

You also need to install the guest extensions to change the VM's resolution.

[dbaker]

wow, I didn't know that! how much ram would you reccomend? I have a measly 12 mb.

[SteveRiley]

Jack it up all the way, to 11. I mean 128 MB.

Have you installed the guest extensions into the VM?

[dbaker]

No, I don't know how to. I've got the little CD image on my desktop now. I don't know what to do from there. Is there a nice easy terminal command for installing them?

[SteveRiley]

VirtualBox has good online documentation. See Chapter 4 in the user manual.

[dbaker]

I installed dkms, then ran
cd /media
sh ./VBoxLinuxAdditions. run

I got:
sh: 0: Can't open ./VBoxLinuxAdditions.

i tried cd /media/ as well, no difference.

[SteveRiley]

cd /media
sh ./VBoxLinuxAdditions. run

You have a space between the period and the word run. That shouldn't be there.

[dbaker]

It's still giving me the same error without the space

[Snowhog]

See http://superuser.com/questions/26164...s-win7-host-os
Scroll down to the green check mark.

[SteveRiley]

But dbaker has a Mac host, so the Windows host instructions won't help. However, the concept is valid: is the ISO mounted?

Also, is the ISO listed in the VirtualBox Manager under File | Preferences | Extensions?

[dbaker]

I believe it's already mounted, since when I command-click on the icon in Dolphin the only options I get are 'eject' and 'release'. It's showing in the available devices menu in the panel, as well. I googled mounting virtual cds in kubuntu but I'm always afraid to follow instructions I find via google in case they're out of date and mess something up (for some reason, the only stuff I find about Linux on google is years old.)

Edit: Steve, yes, it is showing in the virtual media manager (think we have slightly different versions of VB, but this is obviously the right place to look.) It says it's attached to kubuntu.