(Re)Setting Hyper-V Virtual Machine Client Zoom Level
Hi!
A couple of days ago I was playing around with Hyper-V virtual machines. At some point I set the "View" => "Zoom Level" to 25%.
Unfortunately, at 25% the window becomes so small that you cannot see the View menu in the menu bar any more because it gets cut off. And for some reason you cannot use the arrow keys on the keyboard to navigate the menus either.
This zoom level not only applies for a single virtual machine, but all of them, as it as a general Hyper-V client setting.
Trying to access the menu when the VM is shut down does not work because the "Zoom Level" submenu is disabled, and once the VM is booted up, the window resizes instantly.
The only reliable way to (re)set it appears to be editing the Hyper-V client configuration on the host file system:
- Close the Hyper-V client window (the one that opens when you connect to / double-click a VM)
- Open the file at
%UserProfile%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Hyper-V\Client\1.0\vmconnect.configand set the setting withZoomLevelback to100(or something similarly usable):<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<configuration>
<Microsoft.Virtualization.Client.InteractiveSession.InteractiveSessionConfigurationOptions>
<setting name="ZoomLevel" type="System.UInt32">
<value>100</value>
</setting>
[...]
</Microsoft.Virtualization.Client.InteractiveSession.InteractiveSessionConfigurationOptions>
</configuration> - Save and close the file
- Connect to / double-click a VM again
I hope this was helpful to you.
Thanks for reading!
Source: How to restore auto zoom level in Hyper-V VM window (answers.microsoft.com) - Answer by Trond.R. on November 27, 2020 (Sorry, apparently you can't link to answers directly)
Fix GNOME GUI Login After Upgrade to Debian 10 Buster (VirtualBox VM)
Hello!
Yesterday I upgraded my old Debian VirtualBox VM from Debian 9 stretch to Debian 10 buster.
After going through all the usual upgrade steps from the official documentation and rebooting, I found myself waiting for the GNOME user selection in order to log in. Except that it was stuck with the gray background and nothing except the mouse cursor was showing up or working.
I switched to a text-only terminal (Ctrl+Alt+F5) and logged in via command line. Looking at /var/log/syslog I found the following messages repeating over and over:
gnome-shell[1281]: Failed to set CRTC mode 1448x953: Invalid argument kernel: [ 192.917346] [drm:drm_crtc_helper_set_config [drm_kms_helper]] ERROR failed to set mode on [CRTC:29:crtc-0]
1448x953 is the resolution I am using for the VM.
This current VM was created back when Debian 7 wheezy was still current, and I knew that a more recently created VM (originally with Debian 9 stretch) was working fine after upgrading to 10, so I figured that the info about the resolution from gnome-shell might have something to do with the VM's settings.
Sure enough, I found out that there were about a handful of settings that were different, most likely because over time VirtualBox defaulted to slightly different settings depending on my hardware, the template for the OS I selected (different Debian major releases) and the VirtualBox release itself. A couple of VM starts and configuration changes later I narrowed the problem down to the following VM setting:
Display => Screen => Video Memory
I raised the original 12 MB to 16 MB and thankfully the next boot showed the GNOME login mask as per usual!
Surely this is a very edge case kind of scenario, but I am hoping that this might help you in case you come across the same problem. All the other search results I found regarding roughly the same error message in the logs were about different things.
Thanks for reading!