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Here’s a quick guide to get higher resolutions in X using Fedora Core 3 in VMware.

After getting your Fedora system up and running inside VMware, your system’ll boot up in X. Log in with your user, open a terminal window, and do the following:

[sausenebb@betasuppe ~]$ su
Password: root-passord
[root@betasuppe sausenebb]# /sbin/telinit 3

This will bring your system down to initlevel 3, which is textmode w/networking. For the curious, here are the initlevels:

• 0. Halt/shutdown
• 1. Singleuser
• 2. Multiuser without networking
• 3. Multiuser with networking
• 4. Unused
• 5. X (graphical mode)
• 6. Reboot

Now you’ve got your system into textmode, you’ll need to mount up the VMware tools CD. That’s where the special X driver for VMware is. Press ctrl+alt to release the cursor from VMware. Then, in VMware’s menu: VM -> Removable Devices -> CD-ROM 1 [...] -> Edit...

Under the connection section, select Use ISO image and browse to: C:\Program files\VMware\VMware Workstation\linux.iso (or similar).

Click OK and go back into Linux. You are now at the text login prompt. Login with root. Type mount /media/cdrom to mount the CD-ROM, then tar xvzf /media/cdrom/vmware-linux-tools.tar.gz to untar the installation files to your harddrive. After you’re done with the CD, type umount /media/cdrom to unmount it. Then cd vmware-tools-distrib/bin, and open the file vmware-config-tools.pl with your text editor of choice. Scroll down to line 3055 (!) and change the line /X.org Foundation/ ? '4.4.0' : '0.0.0'; to /X.org Foundation/ ? '4.4.0' : '4.4.0';. Save and close the file.

Go back up one directory with cd .. and start the VMware tools installation with ./vmware-install.pl. Answer the questions asked, the suggested answers should be sufficient in most cases. When asked if you want to recompile the vmhgfs module, answer no. After the installation is done, edit the file /etc/XF86Config. Go to line 23, and change it from Device "/dev/mouse" to Device "/dev/mouse0". Save and close the file.

Bring the system back up to initlevel 5 with the command /sbin/telinit 5, and enjoy your VMware Fedora Core 3 high resolution X graphical working environment™.