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Pavel
Asked: 2018-04-04 14:49:06 +0800 CST

Virtual Machines: High-DPI screen scale resets to 100% when I resize VM's window

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I've installed Ubuntu (tried 17.10 and 18.04 pre-release), since I have a 4k monitor I went to Settings - Devices - Displays and set Scale to 200%.

Everything looks fine until I resize a VM's window (including opening it fullscreen): Ubuntu resets the scale to 100% and everything becomes small.

How can I avoid this and "lock" the scale at 200%?

I tried this with VirtualBox and VMWare Player with the same results. I know there is a "scale factor" in VirtualBox's settings but it is not the same and it makes pictures blurry.

virtualbox vmware display-resolution display screen

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Fire up your terminal and type:

    gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface scaling-factor 2

    In virtualbox i tested it, and i can resize vm window without losing scaling. This applies to wayland, so 17.10 is best to test this.

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  2. I'm using VMWare and Ubuntu 18.04 LTS; and later 20.04 LTS. I never got gsettings to work right. Maybe that's because I have Wayland turned off, as it is broken on my all my VMWare VMs.

    Instead, I use this command: xrandr --output Virtual1 --scale 1.75x1.75, which seems to work well enough. It doesn't resize until after I log in. The command is persistent, so I haven't added it to any startup scripts or anything.

    I don't have any problems with a blurry display, and I definitely have to use a factor greater than zero -- otherwise, the text and user interface elements are very large. It's counter-intuitive, but that's what's working for me! Maybe two different things are fighting to scale correctly?

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