(Solved) Re: Where are "xrandr" settings stored?
On Mon, 24 Jan 2011 14:07:54 +0000, Darac Marjal wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 23, 2011 at 10:14:34PM +0000, Liam O'Toole wrote:
>> On 2011-01-22, Camaleón wrote:
>> > Hello,
>> >
>> > Yesterday I faced a "chicken-egg" problem :-)
>> >
>> > I have a virtual machine (virtualbox) in a notebook with Squeeze
>> > installed and wanted to add an external 17" LCD display (native
>> > resolution is 1280x1024).
>> >
>> > The problem came when I mistyped the command and gave xrandr a "wrong
>> > value" to use (by "wrong value" I'll just say that viewable screen
>> > area was 1280x60... yes, that reads "60" for the screen height).
>>
>> [...]
>>
>> VirtualBox stores the last window size for each guest OS, in the file
>> ~/.VirtualBox/Machines/[machine_name]/[machine_name].xml. For example:
>>
>> <ExtraDataItem name="GUI/LastGuestSizeHint" value="720,400"/>
Hum... good catch! :-)
In fact, once I've read your post I made some searching on this value and
it seems that holds the size of the VM window. This value is completely
independent of any xorg or xrandr settings stored settings that are
available inside the VM -and I could verified this point by setting a
"0,0" assignment to "GUI/LastGuestSizeHint" which had no effect after
restarting the virtual box machine.
>> (I think you mentioned elsewhere in this thread that you tried the same
>> experiment on a USB stick, with the same result, but the above could
>> help you recover the guest OS' dimensions.)
Yep, the other test I made was over an IDE disk (by means of external USB
case) but I found the mess: on this system I used "gnome-display-
properties" to change the display settings and this was effectively
stored under "~/.config/monitors.xml" (with the VM problem I forgot to
delete it and wrongly assumed the problem was the same under the two
systems while it was not!).
> I think this is the nub of the problem. xrandr requested the resolution
> change, Virtualbox complied and then when you restart X, the size of the
> modified window is detected by Xorg.
Sort of. VirtualBox "obeys" two VM main parameters here¹:
1/ Scale mode ("host key+C")
2/ Resize the machine's window (which allows to fit the full VM desktop
at the same size of the VM window)
> I suspect that, if you had the VirtualBox tools installed in the guest,
> you could have fixed this just by doing Machine -> Auto-resize Guest
> Display.
And that did it!
It was "auto resize guest display". The solution to this problem was just
by pressing "Ctrl+G" and that was all what I needed to get the VM to be
restored at a comfortable resolution without having to make "black magic"
or weird sacrifices!
Thanks to all of you who presented any tip on this, I really appreciated.
This just turned out to be another of those PEBKAC situations that
happens from time time :-)
¹http://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch01.html#intro-resize-window
Greetings,
--
Camaleón
Reply to: