Increasing the screen resolution on your Mac OSX VM

After part 2 of my Mac OSX VM tutorial, I said I’d post an update for how to increase the screen resolution.  It’s pretty simple; there are two files to edit, and if you want a resolution higher than 1280×1024, a virtualbox command to run on the host machine.  I’ll do two examples, then; one where we’ll change the VM to 1280×1024, and one where we’ll change it to 1680×1050.

First, let’s change from the default 1024×768 to 1280×1024.  You’ll need to edit two files:

/Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.Boot.plist

and

/Extra/com.apple.Boot.plist

Open a terminal, and enter the following command (you can of course use a different editor if you prefer):

sudo nano /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.Boot.plist

You’ll see a file that looks like this:

We’re going to add just two lines to the file.  You can see them here:

That last “x32” is important, so don’t forget it!  Once you’ve added those two lines to the file, press Ctrl+O to save, then Ctrl+X to exit nano.

Add the same two lines to /Extra/com.apple.Boot.plist, using sudo again.  My /Extra/com.apple.Boot.plist already had a “Graphics Mode” entry — if yours does, don’t add another, simply edit the one that’s already there.

Finally, reboot the OSX VM.  When it restarts, you should be running at 1280×1024!

Alright, now let’s try 1680×1050.  Edit the same two files, but enter 1680x1050x32 instead of 1280x1024x32 for the resolution.  Shut down OSX, and power off the VM.

Now, you’ll need to run a VBoxManage command on your host machine.  The command itself is the same for Linux and Windows hosts; in Linux, you’ll just need to make sure “vboxmanage” is in $PATH so you can run the command I describe below.

In Windows, open a command prompt, and cd to the directory VirtualBox is installed in.  For me, that’s “C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox\”.  Next, run the VBoxManage command you see in the screenshot below:

Replace “MacOSX” with your VM’s exact name.  If you followed my tutorial, I used “MacOSX”, so if yours is named something else, make sure you change it in this command.

Now, boot up your OSX VM – it should start at 1680×1050!

Note that this same process also works for 1920×1080, but the UI gets a little choppy if you go that high.