VMware-Forum

hello.

i have one question. I am trying to run gentoo linux in vmware using the vesa framebuffer driver and, off course it doesn work. the framebuffer console driver and the vmware tools graphics driver seem to be incompatible. I dont whant to install X11 to use a higer resolution in the console app. My question is: is there any way to make the framebuffer run in vmware (kernel patch, etc ...) ? further i really do not understand why vmware has not implemented a frambuffer console driver in its kernel modules. is there a particular reason or was it just because of everybody is using X11 ?

thx , nina

It is no problem to run a framebuffer console under vmware, even the vanilla kernel supports it. so most likely you are just missing a kernel feature. do you use the vanilla kernel or gentoo-sources? gentoo sources has an additional framebuffer driver, vesafb-tng, i encourage that one.
so you just need

Device Drivers
-> Graphics Support
[X] Support for Frame-Buffer devices

Device Drivers
-> Graphics Support
-> Vesa VGA Graphics Support -> vesafb-tng

Device Drivers
-> Graphics Support
-> Console Display Driver Support
-> Framebuffer console support

you also need to adjust your boot options, grub.conf or lilo.conf
i.e. for vesafb-tng you need to append video=vesafb:ypan,1024x768-16@60
it is different for vesafb!

vmware has no need to provide this as a module good luck