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Problems with Your Graphical Display

The following table lists problems you might encounter with graphical display within virtual machines and suggests solutions for resolving the issues.

The display in the guest operating system has black or white blocks after installing VMware Tools.

This is a known problem for host systems running Windows NT and Windows 2000. To work around this problem, select View > AutoFit from the VMware Workstation window.

If this action does not solve the problem, please submit a suppport request at http://www.vmware.com/requestsupport. Be sure to indicate that you have already tried the suggested workaround.

When running X in a Linux guest operating system, the following warning message appears: Your X11 server lacks DPMS support.

DPMS, or Display Power Management System, is a facility used by X servers for automatically powering down or blanking the computer's display. This functionality is not supported in a virtual machine. However, some applications enable DPMS by default (including the KDE desktop).

To avoid receiving this warning message, be sure that DPMS is turned off in the guest operating system. In KDE, follow these steps to turn off DPMS:

  1. Open the KDE Control Center.
  2. Expand the Desktop node.
  3. Click DPMS.
  4. Deselect the DPMS Enabled option.

A DirectDraw application does not run inside a virtual machine.

VMware products provide very limited support for DirectDraw through the Hardware Emulation Layer (HEL) in DirectDraw. Many DirectDraw applications do not run in a virtual machine.

Microsoft Windows 95, Windows 98 and Windows NT's DirectDraw implementation can emulate DirectX/DirectDraw support for a device that does not support DirectDraw (such as VMware's virtual SVGA adapter). This is enabled in the HEL within DirectDraw. This emulation may, however, be slow or unreliable.

A Direct3D graphics program cannot run inside a virtual machine.

VMware products do not support Direct3D graphics for virtual machines. Therefore, applications that require this feature cannot run inside a virtual machine, even if they install without errors.

The screen is corrupted when the virtual machine switches to or runs in full screen mode.

You need to upgrade to the X server that is provided with the VMware Workstation distribution. If you upgrade to the latest X server for your Linux host and continue to experience problems, please submit a support request at http://www.vmware.com/requestsupport. Please include information on the exact graphics card (manufacturer, model, chipset and memory) installed in the host, a copy of the XF86Config file and the version and type of X server you are using on the host.

Color appears strangely when VMware Workstation is in windowed mode and changes when the cursor focus moves between VMware Workstation windows and the host operating system.

VMware does not recommend using a host X display that uses pseudocolor (8 bit, 256 color). This is a standard limitation of pseudocolor X servers.

Graphics performance is slow or erratic in full screen mode.

To optimize graphics performance when in full screen mode, configure the host operating system with an appropriate X server. Linux versions VMware products should run with generic X servers, but technical support is only available for customers running X servers from the XFree86 Project (http://www.xfree86.org). The Xfree86 servers provide significant improvements in full screen graphics mode.

VMware highly recommends that you install XFree86 version 3.3.4 or later because these versions contain VMware extensions to Direct Graphics Access (DGA) 1.1 that allow virtual machines to take advantage of hardware-based 2-D graphics acceleration.

To use DGA, the guest operating system must also be running the VMware SVGA graphics driver included in VMware Tools.

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