How are you trying to adjust the display resolution? Have you tried adjusting the resolution using settings within the VM?

If you're looking to have the resolutioh change when you resize the VM's windows, you'll need both open-vm-tools and open-vm-tools-desktop installed in the VM. You'll probably find that they are not installed since you moved that VM from a physical system that doesn't need those tools. 

When run under the VMware hypervisor, your system will want to have

* proper drivers installed (X11 / mesa)

* "open-vm-tools" (and, where available) "open-vm-tools-desktop" packages installed

* the "vmtoolsd" systemd service (from the open-vm-tools package above) active and running

That's good enough.

Alternatively, simply manually change the screen resolution inside your guest. The tools are just convenience.

Thanks for your answers.

As said before, the live system does not offer root / su access and does not allow any settngs.

that's why I thought, fusion / player could immulate a hardware display max. resolution which is automatically recognized by te guest os. same procedure that happens, when I connect a display to a dedicated pc, running this live system.

as it seems, this is not possible ..

By default, the guest OS will see an SVGA video adapter, and use its own built-in driver.  The VMware Tools (for Linux guests, now use the open-vm-tools and open-vm-desktop-tools (I think those are the package names) which include the driver for the VMware emulated video adapter, and will allow additional screen resolutions and resizing.

I don’t think open-vM-tools contains the Linux vmwgfx VMware SVGA driver; rather it’s provided as a module by the Linux kernel. That means Linux itself has everything it needs to recognize the VMware SVGA graphics like @RDPetruska says. The tools a provide the ability to change the resolution when resizing the window (among other things).

If the builder of that live system doesn’t include that driver module or has disabled the driver at boot time then you’re going to be stuck with the generic Linux frame buffer driver which doesn’t have resize capability. 

I remember a hack to get GRUB to tweak the boot loader video size and propagate it into the running system. I’m not sure if something like that might help, because it would have to be manually repeated every time you’d reboot the VM.

Just for grins, what are the GRUB commands being used for that live system. You can find them out by highlighting the boot argument in the boot menu and typing ‘e’ instead of return. The commands being used should be displayed.