640x480 resolution at graphical installer when using vmware FIX
Man I had a blast trying to boot Xenial inside a VMware guest (on top of Windows). It seems that xorg has a 640x480 low-resolution problem when trying to install any Linux guest even though the emulated video driver can display much higher resolutions perfectly fine but I'm focusing on 1024x768. It took me about a week to get it correct so I want to share my experience with you all.
EDITED TO ADD: This fix should work with Virtualbox and other hypervisors since it only involves the linux kernel.
So I wanted to give Kubuntu a try and so I grabbed the desktop iso and made a vmware guest for it like I do with my other Linux systems. But throughout all these distros I kept noticing an annoying problem that is the resolution was too small to use the installer. I actually thought vmware's graphics device had gone crazy so I experimented with other virtualization programs like KVM and Xen inside some of my other Linux guests, Debian mainly.
Trying to set up Xen was like writing an entire C program to me. I was just blindly following instructions from the Debian wiki and I thought "No way this is going to work". But I really wanted to try Kubuntu so I think you know how that feels
. xen-tools supports setting up Xenial, but I was expecting a full-featured interface with a lot of control over the parameters of the guest machine (that's why I use vmware). And if any of you have heard of Colinux, xen-tools feels exactly like that and I wasn't happy about it. I never finished the setup and deleted Xen from the system because the setting up was very complicated. Now that I think of it, I should have used libvirt instead of xen-tools. But it was still fun and I plan to set aside more time later to get a Xen system up and running for real.
KVM worked well but I guess I didn't give my linux system enough memory to virtualize Kubuntu but I thought "Come on, maybe this is a KVM problem". Because I certainly wasn't interested in interrupting this to do another set of diagnostics.
The thing was, I ran the openSUSE installer before, and it lets you select a video resolution. So it must be an X.org problem or something.
I changed a bunch of kernel boot flags like nomodeset and edid_firmware but those didn't fix anything, the real solution to all of this X.org/VMware nonsense was to specify a vga mode at the boot prompt, like "vga=<some hex number>". I actually don't remember any of the hex numbers but the nice thing about the linux kernel is that it prompted me with a list of valid modes and let me pick one. This fixed the resolution for the entire boot and install process. Actually I didn't install Kubuntu yet, I only used the Live DVD and I really like it. I'll see how it does compared to my Manjaro KDE system.
Can someone give me a link to a list of hex codes which are valid for recent kernels?
I noticed that Kubuntu went into a black screen and never came out. Apparently I did not give Kubuntu enough memory so I gave it 2GB.
P.S. I did not find an /etc/X11/xorg.conf file in four different distros I used (CentOS, Manjaro, Debian and now this one here). Did anyone else notice this on their machines or is it just me? Is it even located there, I can't even remember It can't be VMware tools deleting the file because I never install vmware tools in my Linux guests. As usual doing things like this teaches me a lot about how different linux programs work.
EDITED TO ADD: This fix should work with Virtualbox and other hypervisors since it only involves the linux kernel.
So I wanted to give Kubuntu a try and so I grabbed the desktop iso and made a vmware guest for it like I do with my other Linux systems. But throughout all these distros I kept noticing an annoying problem that is the resolution was too small to use the installer. I actually thought vmware's graphics device had gone crazy so I experimented with other virtualization programs like KVM and Xen inside some of my other Linux guests, Debian mainly.
Trying to set up Xen was like writing an entire C program to me. I was just blindly following instructions from the Debian wiki and I thought "No way this is going to work". But I really wanted to try Kubuntu so I think you know how that feels
. xen-tools supports setting up Xenial, but I was expecting a full-featured interface with a lot of control over the parameters of the guest machine (that's why I use vmware). And if any of you have heard of Colinux, xen-tools feels exactly like that and I wasn't happy about it. I never finished the setup and deleted Xen from the system because the setting up was very complicated. Now that I think of it, I should have used libvirt instead of xen-tools. But it was still fun and I plan to set aside more time later to get a Xen system up and running for real.KVM worked well but I guess I didn't give my linux system enough memory to virtualize Kubuntu but I thought "Come on, maybe this is a KVM problem". Because I certainly wasn't interested in interrupting this to do another set of diagnostics.
The thing was, I ran the openSUSE installer before, and it lets you select a video resolution. So it must be an X.org problem or something.I changed a bunch of kernel boot flags like nomodeset and edid_firmware but those didn't fix anything, the real solution to all of this X.org/VMware nonsense was to specify a vga mode at the boot prompt, like "vga=<some hex number>". I actually don't remember any of the hex numbers but the nice thing about the linux kernel is that it prompted me with a list of valid modes and let me pick one. This fixed the resolution for the entire boot and install process. Actually I didn't install Kubuntu yet, I only used the Live DVD and I really like it. I'll see how it does compared to my Manjaro KDE system.
Can someone give me a link to a list of hex codes which are valid for recent kernels?
I noticed that Kubuntu went into a black screen and never came out. Apparently I did not give Kubuntu enough memory so I gave it 2GB.
P.S. I did not find an /etc/X11/xorg.conf file in four different distros I used (CentOS, Manjaro, Debian and now this one here). Did anyone else notice this on their machines or is it just me? Is it even located there, I can't even remember
It can't be VMware tools deleting the file because I never install vmware tools in my Linux guests. As usual doing things like this teaches me a lot about how different linux programs work.
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