Gnome Shell weirdness

With Fedora 16 and KDE, or Ubuntu 11.10 and Unity, and Parallels Tools installed, everything works right on current Lion in full screen mode. You fire up the VM, it pops up on a Lion full screen window, and voila. You log in, and it fills the screen with your X11 stuff.

With Fedora 16 *or* Ubuntu 11.10 while running Gnome 3 (Gnome Shell), on the other hand, it basically creates a little 640x480 subset of the screen once you log in and draws everything there. If you pop out of full screen mode then back in, *then* it fills the screen with your desktop.

My guess is a race condition wherein Gnome Shell is asking for the screen geometry from X11 before Parallels Tools has determined it (thus why it works *after* Gnome Shell is up and going when the screen-size-change notification system via DBUS is being used instead), but that's just a guess. The work around is pretty easy -- just pop out of full screen, pop back into full screen -- but annoying.

Anybody else seeing this behavior? Note that I have a *very* fast Macbook Pro -- 750gb 7200 rpm drive, 2.4ghz Core I7, 16GB RAM, etc. -- so it may be that my system is simply fast enough to expose a race condition that doesn't occur on slower computers?

 

You need to edit your xorg.conf file to include your full screen resolution.

 

Sounds like an interesting work-around. Note that Fedora 16 does not by default have an xorg.conf, it relies on hardware autoprobing by the X server, but it looks like the Parallels Tools installer created one -- with the wrong default resolution in it. Said default resolution only being used when Parallels Tools doesn't know what the screen resolution is. Hmm...

 

Don't know if it's a workaround or not. May just be the price of running a VM.

 

Well, VirtualBox doesn't have that problem (but it has other problems, such as not doing USB passthrough correctly), so it's not the price of a VM, it's something specific to Parallels. Furthermore, it doesn't happen if you boot a Linux 2D desktop, only when you boot a Gnome Shell 3D desktop. But since there's such an easy work-around, it's not worth worrying about anymore. (Note that VMware Fusion 4 *still* doesn't offer 3D support for Linux guests so that's not even in the running).