[SOLVED] Parallels Tools resolution issue with i3 (tiling window manager) and Ubuntu 18.04

[Joe Gibson]

Hey there,

I'm using an Ubuntu 18.04 guest VM and am having an issue where the screen resolution is stuck at 1024x768 when I log in using the i3 desktop environment, which is a popular tiling window manager. When I log in using the Ubuntu desktop environment (Gnome), the display resolution updates correctly, and it looks fine. However, when using i3, it seems that the prlcc tool is not working properly and does not properly configure.

Once I log in using i3, I have tried using xrandr with various configurations, but even when I manually set the resolution with xrandr, the display does not look right. It is very pixelated and stretched and it's as if the top half of the screen is outside the virtual screen. For example if I have a terminal open and then set the resolution to the correct resolution using xrandr, the screen is resized improperly such that I cannot see the top portion of my terminal window any longer and half to hit 'enter' a dozen or so times to get the cursor within the visible window.

I presume that there is something that either is not starting or is starting but failing when using i3 rather than the Ubuntu desktop environment.

I did find this post from 2014 with the same problem, but there couple of solutions listed did not work for me (i.e. manually running xrandr or manually running prlcc after login).

Using Parallels Desktop 15 Pro Version 15.1.2 (47123) with the latest Parallels tools installed.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

 

[Joe Gibson]

All,

The issue seems to have been related to my local Compton configuration file: ~/.config/compton-config. In my i3 config file, I had the line:

exec --no-startup-id compton --config ~/.config/compton-conf --focus-exclude '_NET_WM_NAME@:s = "rofi"'

I suspected that it might be related to my local config, so I removed the --config flag to load the default, and voilà, it worked.

I then compared my local config file to a default I found here, and noticed that the "backend" variable was the only thing different. I had mine set to "xr_glx_hybrid", and the default had it set to "xrender".

After changing the backend back to "xrender", everything seems to be working properly!