Mike Southby

At this stage I am assuming that you already have Sun VirtualBox installed and that you have gone through the process of installing a new virtual machine and installed the latest Ubuntu release.  It’s at this stage once you have started Ubuntu that you’ll be greeted with a low resolution screen, when you go to the display options you’ll find that you only get options to choose 800×600 or 640×400 which let’s face it, is not very helpful with modern screens.  Personally, I am running a 1920×1200 resolution so found the default virtual Ubuntu almost unworkable.

Fortunately, there is a simple way to overcome this; all you need to do is follow the following steps:

• Start your virtual box and log into Ubuntu in the normal way
• Hit the right ctrl key so that you can get you mouse pointer outside of the virtual box as you’ll now need to work with the host machine
• Go to the top of the virtual window, click on Devices and then select Install Guest Additions.  You’ll now see the virtual CDROM installed within Ubuntu and a new icon will appear on the desktop
• Click back inside the virtual box again and go to Applications, Accessories and then Terminal
• Type cd /media/cdrom0 and then hit enter
• Type sudo sh ./VBoxLinuxAdditions-x86.run and then hit enter.  You should then see the following:

• You now need to reboot the virtual machine
• Log back into Ubuntu and go to System, Preferences then Display.  You should now have more options than the original low resolution options you had.

Depending on your specific hardware, you may still find that you’d like a different combination or higher resolution than the new ones which are listed; again, there is a solution:

• Open Terminal again by going to Applications, Accessories and Terminal
• Type sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf and then hit enter.  You will be asked for your password, type this and hit enter again
• The text editor will now load, before changing anything make a backup by going to the file menu and choose save as, changing the file name to xorgbak.conf
• Now to make the changes.  Unlike previous versions you will not see a long list of configuration options, 9.10 creates these settings dynamically.  However you can still add specific combinations so add your desired settings here (Caveat: Working with xorg.conf is a topic in itself so do not add code here unless you are sure what you are doing, you WILL break the installation and either have to fix it from the command line or reinstall the virtual machine), this will vary depending on your hardware and the resolution you are trying to achieve.
• You must now do a save as but ensure you change the filename back to the original xorg.conf otherwise you will overwrite the backup you have just created.
• Restart the virtual box and you should now have the new screen resolutions!

Enjoy!