Thursday, August 21, 2014

Ubuntu LTS 12 on VMWare Player Showing Multiple Columns of Identical Screens

Symptoms

After updating to Kernel 3.2.0.67 and reboot, my screen is showing three columns of duplicated desktop. 

Environment: 

  • VMWare Player 6.0.3
  • Ubuntu: 12.04 LTS, Kernel 3.2.0.67 (post upgrade version, I'm not sure what was the version before my upgrade)
  • The VM image was created way back in a very old VMWare Player, started from Ubuntu 10. It has been kept up-to-date by applying Ubuntu patches and eventually to 12.04 LTS. Turn out this probably was the root cause of all the troubles

Solution

After some Google search and reading up on posts, I was eventually lead to the following thread:
Guest display split into identical panes
Flip to page 2, on post 17 from thellstrom, there is the solution that worked for me. I used solution 1b mentioned in the post, and after reboot, everything is back to normal.

Cause

So, based on the article, root cause of the problem is due to VM created on old version of player with virtualHW version 7. I updated the config file from version 7 to 9, and everything appears to be working now.

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