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Accepted
willbeeler
Asked: 2012-02-16 07:13:34 +0800 CST

How do you resize the standard Ubuntu Desktop inside of Virtualbox?

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So I've installed Ubuntu inside of Virtualbox, and I resized the window of Virtualbox to be full-size, but the Ubuntu Desktop stays the same standard size. How do I make the width of Ubuntu stretch 100% across the Virtualbox window?

virtualbox

4 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Inside the virtual machine, install the virtualbox-guest-dkms, virtualbox-guest-utils and virtualbox-guest-x11 packages. These "guest additions" include a video driver that will do what you ask, plus a mouse driver that interacts with the host system so you don't have to use the host key to "uncapture" the mouse; it just works when you're on the virtual machine's window.

    There are 2 ways to do this:

    1. From the VirtualBox top menu choose Devices, Install guest additions, then wait for a mock-CD ROM to appear and run the install from there, or

    2. just type

      sudo apt-get install virtualbox-guest-dkms virtualbox-guest-utils virtualbox-guest-x11

    (personal recommendation: the second (apt-get) option is very simple and quick).

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  2. Shutdown your virtual box and in a terminal shell type the following command

    VBoxManage setextradata global GUI/MaxGuestResolution 1366,768

    the 1366,768 is just what i have set for my screen resolution on my laptop, change this to whatever your current resolution is on the machine your running. This should maximize all screens to full 100% on all guest os's

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  3. Using Ubuntu inside VirtualBox on Win7 you need to reboot Ubuntu after the virtualbox-guest-dkms install before resizing would work.

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  4. Once you have installed the VirtualBox Extension Pack (scroll until you see the Extension Pack section) use host+G or the menu option under View > Auto-resize Guest Display.

    NOTE: The Extension Pack version must match the version of VirtualBox.

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