screen width in parallels

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Hello!

I've installed Parallels and I'm running Ubuntu Linux in it. Everything works fine, but the screen width smaller than the actual laptop's screen, so there are two vertical black large stripes on each side of the screen when I switch to full screen mode.

Trying other screen configurations doesn't fix it.

Any suggestions of how this can be sorted?

Thanks a lot! xinelo
 

cwa107


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Hello!

I've installed Parallels and I'm running Ubuntu Linux in it. Everything works fine, but the screen width smaller than the actual laptop's screen, so there are two vertical black large stripes on each side of the screen when I switch to full screen mode.

Trying other screen configurations doesn't fix it.

Any suggestions of how this can be sorted?

Thanks a lot! xinelo

Parallels will do this on-the-fly with Windows, but unfortunately, I've yet to see a Linux distro that is able to handle resolution changes very well. My guess is that you would have to reconfigure X to detect the window size changes each time you resize in order to have the correct resolution show up in your Display prefs. It should be noted that this is a limitation with Linux more so than a problem with Parallels.
 
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xinelo
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thanks cwa107,

well, I agree with you about linux handling screen resolutions in general, except perhaps for ubuntu, which, in my experience, was able to recognize my laptop's screen configuration perfectly, something in which all others (fedora, mandriva, linex, suse, etc.) failed.

anyway, thanks for the hint, i'll try to find out how to reconfigure my X (any recommendation?).

the funny thing is that when I click on the "full screen" button, ubuntu appears occupying the whole screen for one second, then it goes black and then it reappears in the way i described earlier (not large enough).

thanks and cheers! xinelo
 

cwa107


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thanks cwa107,

well, I agree with you about linux handling screen resolutions in general, except perhaps for ubuntu, which, in my experience, was able to recognize my laptop's screen configuration perfectly, something in which all others (fedora, mandriva, linex, suse, etc.) failed.

anyway, thanks for the hint, i'll try to find out how to reconfigure my X (any recommendation?).

the funny thing is that when I click on the "full screen" button, ubuntu appears occupying the whole screen for one second, then it goes black and then it reappears in the way i described earlier (not large enough).

thanks and cheers! xinelo

Yes, Ubuntu in particular does detect screen resolutions very well during setup. The problem is that this detection is not variable. Once X decides what screen resolutions are possible, that's it - it's not going to give you any new options until you reconfigure X. So, running in a VM where any number of possible resolutions can exist, Linux is not really in it's element (regardless of the distro).

To reconfigure X, start up your favorite shell and type:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg
 
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I find with Ubuntu that it's a bit of an oddball. If I boot my (real) machine with the monitor switched off it defaults to 640x480. However, if I turn the monitor on and see the login screen, I just hit ctrl+alt+backspace to force an X restart and it detects the monitor and sets it up accordingly. Might be worth a try; boot ubuntu, put it in full screen, restart X and see what happens.
 

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