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I have a lot of Ubuntu 16 running on my vmware 12.5.8 hosted on Windows 10. Suddenly my Ubuntu systems has decided to die with message:

The system is running in low-graphic mode.

There are a lot of cases like this on internet, none of recipes helped me to solve problem. I tried to reinstall desktop, don't see anything starnge in X's log file Xorg.0.log.

I suppose change Nvidea, AMD an other graphic cards is not case for me since I run vmware and I suppose I have some kind of vmware graphic card? Please, correct me if I'm wrong.

How to know which graphic card I use? How to reinstall vmware graphic card?

What other log files I need to check in order to find problem?

vico
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  • Contact vmware and use a supported os. Beware is a 3rd party closed source vendor so not much we can do – Panther Jan 07 '18 at 20:15

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Your VM is virtual, so its graphics processor is virtual too. For this reason you can't install the proprietary graphics driver for the graphics card in your physical machine in a virtual machine. Instead you should use the graphics driver that is included in VMware. Allocating more video memory in the VMware settings may alleviate the low-graphics mode problem. In VMware Workstation 11 up to 2GB of video memory can be allocated for additional workload processing power. VMware Workstation 15 and later supports virtual graphics memory up to 3GB. You don't need to be able to boot the Ubuntu guest OS to change its settings in VMware.

You may be experiencing this recent bug: Unity/Compiz in a crash loop after login, after mesa updates of 2018-01-04 which has also caused low-graphics mode when booting. There is no solution for the bug yet, but there are two workarounds for it until the bug gets fixed by a software update.

  1. If you have periodically saved snapshots of the Ubuntu guest OS as you should always do, boot to a snapshot that was saved before January 4, 2018 when the bug was reported.

  2. If you can boot into recovery mode install another desktop environment:

    sudo apt install --no-install-recommends xubuntu-desktop

    Alternatively you can replace xubuntu-desktop with lubuntu-desktop in the above command.

karel
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  • Allocating 2Gb of memory not helped. But where Vmware video driver come from? I did not install any Vmware tools, looks like they come from Ubuntu. Should I use drivers from Vmware? – vico Jan 08 '18 at 07:18
  • VMware virtual graphics drivers are built-in with the VMware application. – karel Jan 08 '18 at 08:12