Tuesday, December 24, 2013

Running Ubuntu full screen under Hyper V 2012

There is no way through the GUI to configure the screen resolution of an Ubuntu guest to run full screen when running under Hyper V 2012 (on Server 2012 / 2012 R2 or Windows 8 / 8.1).

One way to get Ubuntu running full screen is to hard-code the resolution of your monitor as a Linux kernel parameter. My monitor runs at 1680x1050, so I made the following changes to my Ubuntu 13.10 guest:


  1. Edit the grub configuration file, for example: 
    sudo vi /etc/default/grub
     
  2. Find the line starting with GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT, and add "video=hyperv_fb:1680x1050" (or your custom resolution) in between the quotes. For example: 
    GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash video=hyperv_fb:1680x1050"
  3. Save and exit 
  4. Run 
    sudo update-grub
  5. Restart your computer


If you get an error dialog warning about not being able to apply the video mode when logging into the GUI, use the Ubuntu control panel to change the screen resolution to your chosen custom resolution.

12 comments:

  1. Roman Shein26 January, 2014 09:07

    Thanx a lot for this how-to.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Roman Shein26 January, 2014 09:08

    Thanx for the How-to. Finally I was able to make it working.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Unknown11 May, 2014 09:41

    This is great, thank you!

    ReplyDelete
  4. ANIL KUMAR BALYANI26 May, 2014 20:54

    Thanks alot :) that works for me

    ReplyDelete
  5. Laurent C.28 May, 2014 18:28

    Thanks! Helped me... but it's very slow (Ubuntu 14.04 guest, Windows 8 Pro host) ... Any idea?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. nzbart28 May, 2014 19:52

      Good question. Performance and resolution is supposed to have been improved by the new synthetic frame buffer that Microsoft contributed to Linux, but I haven't had any success with it. I see there are quite a few bug reports relating to this functionality, so hopefully the Microsoft Linux developers pick up on those soon and we can stop using workarounds like I have posted here.

      Delete
  6. Anonymous31 May, 2014 13:37

    Thank you very much. It helped me. Thanks.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Luiz18 January, 2015 11:15

    Fantastic! It also helped me a lot! :) Cheers!

    ReplyDelete
  8. Anonymous05 August, 2015 15:14

    Works great. Such a simple solution and it took so much effort to find. Thanks.

    ReplyDelete
  9. TK20 October, 2015 07:55

    awesome.Works for me!!

    ReplyDelete
  10. Anonymous18 February, 2016 09:24

    Once the edits have been made to the file, how do you "Save and Exit"?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. nzbart18 February, 2016 19:15

      If you've managed to make the changes, you can enter:
      :wq

      Have a look at a basic vi tutorial like this one for more detail: https://www.cs.colostate.edu/helpdocs/vi.html.

      Don't forget to run as root (e.g. via sudo), otherwise you won't be able to save the changes.

      Delete

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