Xrandr on startup - Fedora 19, VMWare Fusion

jaykayen · April 23, 2014, 1:16am

I've tried following multiple procedures from various sites but can't seem to get this figured out. There was another thread on here about the same thing but I couldn't figure out how to apply it to my situation. This is my first time on Linux so I'm just learning.

I am running Fedora 19, Cinnamon DE in a VM using VMWare Fusion on a Retina MacBook Pro. I checked the box in VMWare's settings to "Use full resolution for Retina Display" because without it, the display is fuzzy and just plain horrible. The problem, though, is that whenever I login to Linux, the resolution switches to 2560x1600 and everything is just too small. So I switch the res back to 1680x1050 where I like it but the next time I startup the machine, the resolution is back to 2560x1600. So at first I created a bash alias like so

alias res="xrandr --output Virtual1 --mode 1680x1050 --rate 60"

and it works. But I can't figure out how to automatically run this when I login. I've tried placing the following script in /etc/init.d/ :

#!/bin/sh
exec /usr/bin/xrandr --output Virtual1 --mode 1680x1050 --rate 60

but this doesn't do anything. The file is named "screenres" and has permissions "-rwxr-xr-x".

I think there may be a problem with using VMWare Fusion though. It seems like the resolution is low until after I login. Once I login, the resolution seems to switch to the correct settings for a moment (I can tell by the size of the mouse pointer) but before the black screen goes away, the resolution switches to 2560x1600.

I'm just lost as to what to do. Might anyone have some suggestions or advice for me?

bakunin · May 4, 2014, 9:25pm

jaykayen:

I've tried placing the following script in /etc/init.d/ :
#!/bin/sh
exec /usr/bin/xrandr --output Virtual1 --mode 1680x1050 --rate 60
but this doesn't do anything. The file is named "screenres" and has permissions "-rwxr-xr-x".

The problem is: nobody tells anybody to run that script at startup. I suggest you read the manpages of regarding "runlevels" and "init" to get a better understanding about how the startup process of a *ix-system works (notice that there are 2 fundamental layouts, "SysV" and "BSD").

To solve your problem: put (a link to) the script into "/etc/rcN.d", and name it Snn where "nn" is a two-digit number and "N" is the number of the runlevel whichs start you want to trigger the script. Or you can write a configuration file for init and place it in "/etc/init.d". Read the man page for init(5) to find out which format this has to be.

With Fedora/CentOS/RedHat you can also use the "chkconfig" utility to automatically place start/stop-scripts for arbitrary services into the various rc-directories. In this case you would have to change your script to accept "start", "stop" and "status" as parameters and create a pseudo-service from it.

I hope this helps.

bakunin