I've had parallels running now for some time on my MacBook Pro and it's really nice to be able to fire up Windows or Linux when needed. I have a feeling this is going to come in real handy this fall when I'm teaching CS462 and have 40 students using Linux to do their assignment. I can keep a fresh image that's identical to the one their using and just fire it up when I need to try something out.

One thing that's bothered me, however, is that Fedora didn't want to create screens bigger and 800x600. I knew I'd blown over this on the install, but figured I'd come back and figure it out later. Maybe I was Googling the wrong terms, but I couldn't find much specific to setting up screen resolutions on Linux running under Parallels.

Tonight I spent a few minutes figuring it out because John Dougall was having the same problem. As an aside, don't you wish your state representative ran Linux? Here's what I did.

First, I ran system-config-display and selected "Generic LCD Panel 1280x1024" under the "Hardware" tab. Then I edited (by hand) /etc/X11/xorg.conf to change the Modes line in the Section "Screen" declaration to read:

Modes "1280x1024"

This did it. Logging out and logging back in started up the larger screen. I couldn't change the hardware from "Generic" but that didn't seem to matter.