NixOS inside VMWare - dual monitor stopped working

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1

Hi,

I’m using NixOS from within VMWare Workstation Player. Somewhere between nixpkgs revision 1d7db1b9e4cf1ee075a9f52e5c36f7b9f4207502 and e0169d7a9d324afebf5679551407756c77af8930 the dual monitor feature of the player stopped working.

I suspect the guest-tools but have no clue on how to even debug that.

I wonder if anyone has a solution or can even reproduce the problem?

2

Hi,

I’ve encountered the same problem. The culprid is this commit: nixos/vmware-guest: Remove the video driver · NixOS/nixpkgs@5157246 · GitHub

The Hardware acceleration is still working, but resolution scaling and multi monitor setups fail.
You can easily work around the problem by just placing the removed snippet manually in your config and rebuild:

    services.xserver.videoDrivers = [ "vmware" ];
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3

@AMD1212 I’m a bit late to the party but in my case adding “vmware” to the X server’s videoDrivers resulted in the screen in VMware staying completely black as soon as the boot sequence was over.

EDIT: Actually, the VM screen also turns black as soon as I enable 3D graphics acceleration in my VM’s settings in VMware, irrespective of whether I included “vmware” in the videoDrivers. So maybe I’m facing some underlying graphics issue that I haven’t understood yet.

EDIT 2: The 3D graphics acceleration setting causing the screen to stay black was actually a separate issue and due a lack of video memory allocated to the VM. Once I set it to 8GB everything was working again. However, adding “vmware” to the videoDrivers still causes my screen to turn black.