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I don't think this is quite as harmless at it seems at first though. It's not a major problem, but it is fairly annoying. Let me try to explain...

When the vmware-config-tools.pl detects drivers, it offers an array of choices to select the initial screen resolution. Under Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx, since it doesn't detect the proper drivers, it no longer offers that choice. Just about everything appears to work ok, except that gdm starts up with a low screen resolution. Since the driver is unable to determine what kind of monitor is attached to the VM automatically, it chooses 800x600 since it can be virtually certain to at least work somewhat, at least long enough to get logged in.

Well, this seems like "Oh well, no big deal. I can log in at 800x600 and then it will expand out to my larger resolution once it really matters." And as it turns out, that's just what seems to happen. Gnome fires up and sets everything up nice and pretty. Then you try out the new emacs23 package. Oh my! Where on earth did they find such huge fonts??? Why oh why does it think I need all 1152x864 pixels to see an 80 x 25 character window?

Well, it looks like this comes from the way that the vmware driver expanded out from 800x600 to 1152x864. It did it by bumping the dpi setting from 86 to 138 or something like that. (xdpyinfo | grep resolution). One of the changes between emacs22 and emacs23 was that they paid closer attention to the dpi settings as reported by X Windows so that they could make the fonts prettier. So it still thinks it's working with an 800 x 600 display and expands the window out accordingly. Yuck.

Searching for articles on how to set the dpi settings in X on Ubuntu, I find a whole bunch that say to edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf and add "Option dpi 96" or something like that to the section that says what kind of video card the system has. But there is no file at /etc/X11/xorg.conf. So searches for "Ubuntu xorg.conf missing" turn up a handful of articles that explain that XOrg is trying to make that file go away.

It seems that XOrg and Debian and Ubuntu have decided that "We don't need no stinking xorg.conf file. We can figure it all out by ourselves and don't need to bother the user with such arcane details any more." And I suppose for ordinary computers, they're probably right. But as we know, Virtual computers are only almost ordinary. They still have a few eccentricities. And apparently, one of those is that they need to be told what kind of resolution we'd really like to start out in because they can't guess very well. And the endless cacophony of articles that say to run dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg only frustrate because that command does absolutely nothing on Lucid other than burn a few CPU cycles any more. (See the attitude statement at the beginning of this paragraph for the reasons why.)

So this apparently harmless inability to load drivers from the vmware-config-tools.pl script wasn't as harmless as I thought it was at first glance. I wish the tools config script would ask me what resolution I would like to run in so that everything could just stay in that and not keep growing and shrinking my console window and confusing poor programs like emacs.

Anyway, I just needed somewhere to vent after spending the past two or three days trying to figure out why emacs23 is so strange when emacs22 works just fine. I guess this article burst the dam. Thank you for your listening.

Pat