I am really growing on the idea of virtualised OS’s. For a recent uni subject, we have to use a virtualised environment, and its great. No bullshit configuration of the host system or servers. Everything is ready to go out of the box.
Except that due to my monitors 1280×800 non standard resolution, I learnt that just editing XOrg.conf and providing a new resolution would not do the trick.
As described here: Configuring The Appliance Debian, you need to run vmware-tools-config, to tell vmware of your new resolution. I don’t know where it pulls the lists of resolutions from, so I updated /etc/X11/XOrg.conf and /etc/X11/xf86config-4 to include the 1280×800 resolution (just in front of all the prelisted 1024×768 800×600 640×480 bits)
After a restart of X (CTRL+ALT+Backspace), the new login screen filled the entire window. On logging into Gnome, the picture went back to letterbox. To configure Gnome, go to Desktop->Preferences->Screen Resolution.
There should be a lot more there now than there were before 😉