Nixos as vmware guest

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1

Hi,

I am new to nixos. I managed to install and run nixos (latest) as vmware guest. However, my mouse integration doesn’t seem to be working, i.e. I need to press ‘Ctrl+Alt’ to release mouse if I want to move out.

More importantly, ‘Fit guest now’ option is greyed out. I have enabled virtualisation.vmware.guest.enable = true; in my configuration.nix however that doesn’t seem to solve the issue. Any pointers?

Warm regards
Bikal

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2

I import this into my VMs and it works without any further configuration:

{
    virtualisation.vmware.guest.enable = true;
}

Unless I am missing something, that is exactly what you have already.

Which DE/WM are you using? How complicated is your configuration.nix, is it possible there is something strange going on in there? Can we see it?

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3

Should I necropost or not, but after adding this line guest tools seems to be installed, mouse is grabbed and a vmware- tools are avaliable, but screen is not resizing, as well as fit guest now option is doing nothing
I have a Nixos install with plasma without any changes

4

I’m having the same issue with auto-fitting/resizing as @bikallem and @megapro17. Guest tools (aka open-vm-tools) are installed and running, as confirmed by systemctl status vmware.service, and I did make sure to add enough video memory to my VM as per open-vm-tools does not resize the display on Ubuntu 15.04 · Issue #54 · vmware/open-vm-tools · GitHub . However “Fit guest now” remains grayed out and the screen resolution does not adjust automatically.

What I noticed, though, is that xrandr will output a different “preferred” resolution (marked with the plus +), depending on the VM’s window size. It just doesn’t switch to that resolution automatically. Running xrandr --output <output name> --preferred changes that. It’s still annoying to run that command manually but, hey, at least now I can bind it to some key in i3wm.

EDIT: I have created a ticket here: open-vm-tools: Auto-resizing / auto-adjusting the guest resolution to VMware window size does not work · Issue #396378 · NixOS/nixpkgs · GitHub