Ubuntu Linux 5.10 on Virtual PC 2004 Screen Resolution Problems

Categories: Linux, Ubuntu, VirtualPC

I've made the mistake of installing Linux distro's just to see if I like them, before having tried them out before hand. This generally becomes a pain dealing with the boot loader, and occasionally fixing Windows XP through the Recovery Console. A few people on the net had recommended that I try out Ubuntu Linux. This time around I decided to try it on Microsoft Virtual PC 2004.

Installation took about 2 hours on my PC and everything seemed fine until after the installation was complete. On my first boot up Ubuntu resolution was messed up. My screen was unreadable. Upon doing some troubleshooting on the net I read that Microsoft Virtual PC 2004 doesn't support 24bit screen resolutions. The solution then was to change the color depth of Ubuntu's screen resolution. This was accomplished by rebooting the virtual machine, hitting escape to access GRUB and then choosing the Recovery Mode. This booted me into Linux to the command prompt as root. From there I typed:

cd /etc/X11

and hit return, and then I typed:

pico xorg.conf

I then changed the 24 under screen resolution to 16. Then I saved and rebooted, and Ubuntu worked just fine. I must say though, I am beginning to like Microsoft Virtual PC 2004 less and less and time, as the problems go on and on.

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