Saturday, October 10, 2015

Getting a higher resolution qemu on openindiana Oct 2015

I found something interesting on the mailing list today. Apparently openindiana has some sort of support for virtual consoles -only on certain computers, though; and not for qemu, as I found out the hard way.

First, here's the wiki entry; http://wiki.openindiana.org/oi/4.6+Remote+Console

As I said, this won't work on kvm. But by trying to get it to work I was able to finally break free of the low-res hell that I was stuck in with qemu/vga -std. On Krexel's essay "qemu: using cirrus considered harmful" I found an interesting tidbit which will prove very useful. You can set qemu's video ram from the command line. The way I've done it with my hipster box is to edit "-std vga" to "-vga std -global VGA.vgamem_mb=256 " which is admittedly overkill, but it seemed to help.


Then I simply pasted the xorg.conf I found on this page:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/KVM/FAQ --deleting the mouse section (to prevent a potential conflict with the illumos mouse driver).

Going back to the wiki link I posted earlier, I used and ssh session to turn gdm off with this command: svcadm disable svc:/application/graphical-login/gdm:default ...followed by
svcadm enable svc:/application/graphical-login/gdm:default to turn it back on to test my changes.

There's a down-side, though. I edited /etc/X11/xorg.conf and set my screen resolution to 1280x1020 and it seems to play hell with both Qemu's sdl and gvncviewer; if I solve that problem, I'll write a follow-up or edit this post.

[EDIT] ...and here's that update! I'm finding that I can simply add "-full-screen" to the commandline, and/or do ctrl-alt-f to go fullscreen. Starting Hipster Oct 2015 in graphical mode gets weird, but switching out of and then back into full screen seems to fix that, at least so far.

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