VMware Workstation guest, can't get above 1176x885

Question

I have an Ubuntu 9.04 (I know, it's old) guest installed on VMware Workstation 12, with the latest VMware Tools and everything. The VM has 3840 MB of RAM and 64 GiB of SCSI HDD.

My problem is that the guest autofit feature only allows a resolution up to 1176x885 (if I resize the window manually, it automatically gets back to that, and if it's maximized it stays at that resolution). Even if the height is smaller, the maximum width is still 1176, and vice-versa. The VMware docs says that this happens on vSphere and other products, and that it means that there isn't enough video RAM, but the settings show that "up to 768 MB will be used", and it shows that for every other Ubuntu VM I have and they all work perfectly. The video/display settings for the VM are the default untouched ones. How can I make that VM work correctly?

Answer 1

As even reinstalling Ubuntu didn't change anything, I thought something was wrong with the VM itself. So I kept my fresh (VMware Tools installed) new Ubuntu 9.04 VMDK, and created another VM with the same specs (RAM, CPU, HDD) and BAM! it worked. So I opened both in WinMerge and compared them, and apart from the standard useless lines, I noticed one that I never heard about:

svga.guestBackedPrimaryAware = "TRUE"

It was present in the old (non-working VM) and not in the new one. Effectively, after removing it from the old VM everything worked correctly. I typed it on Google and found some topics on here about Grub that didn't want to use max resolution and stuff like that, topics that I didn't even see in the results before.

Answer 2

I had the same problem on Ubuntu 20.10. The issue was that while switching kernel packages in order to remove linux-firmware (who needs firmware on a VM?) I had also uninstalled linux-modules-extra-5.8.0-50-generic. The solution was

sudo apt install "linux-modules-extra-$(uname -r)"

and a reboot.