Re: [9fans] VMware resolution > 1024?

["Lawrence E. Bakst" <ml@iridescent.org>]

About 1.5 years ago I tried booting plan9 on both VMware Fusion and Parallels. I had used Parallels before for plan9 and knew plan9 had booted in the past. The following is from my imperfect memory and a few notes I have.

Both products are pretty good and both booted plan9 for me, but they both had their share of issues for my preferred config. I have a MBP 17" with 1920x1200 screen. It would be nice to use all those pixels, but of course it's just over 8 MB @ 32 bpp. I think that's an issue (for me).

It was VMware's Fusion 2.0.2 lack of support for resolutions higher than 1024x768x8 that caused me to stick with Parallels. I actually think Fusion has support for higher (SVGA) resolutions but you have to write to a backdoor, register based, RPC mechanism to turn it on, set the resolution/bpp, and/or map it in. I didn't do it because I could not find any spec for it. It wouldn't be too hard to do if you had a spec. I did find some open source that did hack the VGA settings, but it was riddled with magic numbers and useless comments. If someone has the VMware rpc/SVGA spec, please let me know.

Has anyone upgraded to Parallels 6 and tried to boot plan9?

I have always found Parallels worked pretty well as long as you set OS Type: "Other" and OS Version: "OpenStep". That config of the VM seems to work the best with plan9. Also:

At 8:27 PM -0400 5/17/09, geoff@plan9.bell-labs.com wrote:
>Taking the wiki's advice and specifying in plan9.ini
>
>	mouseport=ps2intellimouse
>
>cures the middle-button problem.

I found that Parallels 3 still had problems with middle clicks on external USB mice, but the above fixes the trackpad issues. I suppose the problem could be with my LogTech control panel not creating the middle clicks correctly. I have some notes on all this but should really get to the latest version of everything before I post anything. Nothing worse that old data points.

Best,

leb

At 12:00 AM -0700 11/10/10, Don Bailey wrote:
>Yeah, that's a fair solution. I already have an Auth, CPU, and FS
>server in my VMware network. I was hoping to use VMware for
>everything, though.
>
>D
>
>On Tue, Nov 9, 2010 at 10:16 AM, David Leimbach <leimy2k@gmail.com> wrote:
>> It's not a solution to your problem, but what I typically like to do for a
>> console these days is use either 9vx or drawterm, and then setup VMWare as a
>> CPU/FS server.
>> Dave
>> On Mon, Nov 8, 2010 at 9:48 PM, Don Bailey <don.bailey@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> Am I missing something? VMware used to have better screen resolution
>>> than 1024x768x8, didn't it? I'm getting kernel panic when I try and
>>> switch to something higher. Suggestions?
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>> D
>>>
>>
>>


--
leb@iridescent.org