Joel Hainley : San Francisco Bay Area Software Consultant

I have been using vmware to host specialized development and testing environments for various clients. With a reasonably powerful machine there isn’t a perceptible difference between a vm and a native install for your workstation plus it offers an impressive amount of flexibility for things. Backups are a snap, moving development environments around can be exciting as well. Thus far it has been a huge win.

I just installed a windows xp vm on my laptop and while my Debian install automagically setup the correct resolution, I wasn’t able to set the xp vm to a widescreen resolution within the vm. So I dug around and found that simply opening the file <yourvmname>.vmx and adding the following lines :

svga.maxWidth = “1680″
svga.maxHeight = “1050″

Save the file. Then reboot the vm. Go into the display settings in the vm and set it to the desired resolution, that’s all there is to it.

The one thing that I don’t know for sure is whether you need to have the VMTools installed for this to work. However I think the VMTools make the vm a little more useful on the desktop so it’s probably worth installing them.