Strange video behavior in VB

[Liam Proven]

On Sat, 31 Oct 2020 at 05:12, MR ZenWiz <mrzenwiz at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> The Mint VM runs ok, just slow.  It has the VMSVGA driver and no 3D
> acceleration (and it complains about that, but I couldn't get it to
> work with that option enabled, so no).  It runs in full screen view
> just fine.  I probably won't use it because I still don't like the
> Mint GUI or the mouse menu "start" button) structure.  It doesn't map
> well for me.

Which GUI? Mint offers several -- I think the main ones are Cinnamon,
Maté and XFCE. I personally favour XFCE because it's the one that does
vertical taskbars best, but Maté is also good if you're happy with
top/bottom/both panels. Cinnamon is GNOME 3 rewritten to look Windows
95-like. I don't see much point, TBH, but it's pretty.

Cinnamon needs hardware acceleration to work well. Try picking one of
the other graphics cards types, reboot to check it works OK, *then*
turn on acceleration. The key thing when troubleshooting is: don't
change 2 variables at the same time.

>   I don't like the GNOME window manager at all - that's one
> of the reasons I switched to Xubuntu back in '12 or '14, I forget
> which.

Agreed!

>  My host screen, panel and keyboard shortcuts are configured
> the way I like them and I see no reason to go back to a weighty GUI/wm
> like GNOME, or Cinnamon.

Also agreed. I'm on Xfce on my work boxes, too, after trying all the
alternatives.

As a low-priority project I am trying to build a GNUstep desktop.
Someone I vaguely know online is way ahead of me, but using FreeBSD as
the basis not Linux:
https://github.com/probonopd/LIVEstep

A Linux-based alternative but using CentOS is AfterStep:
https://github.com/trunkmaster/nextspace


> Then I checked the display settings in my Xubuntu 20.04.1 VM (I used
> that to play with it before upgrading).  The other two had 16Mb of
> memory for display, but this one had 32Mb.  The lights went on, so I
> upped the Mint and Ubuntu VMs to 32Mb, and voila - no more display
> problems.  Both run fine in full screen mode now.

Cool.

I think you must previously have set those down -- as I recall, the
default allowance is a lot and I usually cut it back hard. But the
defaults may have changed; I don't watch _that_ closely. If you have
plenty of host RAM, then you can assign a lot of VRAM -- 64 or 128MB.

(When you realise that 128MB of VRAM is a lot, then you realise how
grotesque gamer-oriented graphics cards with 2GB+ of VRAM are. If you
don't play 3D games in HD, this is total waste. There used to be a
tool to put Linux' swap in the unused video RAM, making some use of
this squandered resource, but it is long unmaintained.)

> However, I then noticed that my Xubuntu 20.04.1 VM would not use the
> whole full screen, and the display settings won't adjust to my 2K
> dimensions.  It does allow 2560x1600, but that falls off the bottom of
> the 1440 pixel screen, and the closest I can get it to a useful size
> is 1920x1200, which looks silly with all that black around it.  I
> don't need it, so I probably won't use it, but I'll hang onto it for
> the heck of it.

OK.

> So, VM display problem partially solved, enough that i can proceed.

Great!

> Many thanks to all who responded, especially Liam, who challenged me
> to look around at many things.

I'm very glad I could help at all. Sorry for my hectoring tone --
these are stressful times.

BTW, are you the MarkR that used to be on CIX?

> I'll shut up now.  :-)

-- 
Liam Proven – Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
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