This weekend I ran into a trivial issue I usually ignore since I will use putty for virtually everything on a Linux virtual machine. I fired up a VM I downloaded and the resolution was 800×600 by default, which compared to the 4k landscape I have available was a little less than ideal. It was a Debian based OS, so the fix was pretty simple. Fire up the terminal and type in “xrandr”, in my case the display was “Virtual1”, it will show you a list of available resolutions. Once you find the one you want set it by using the command:
xrandr --output --mode


In my case this was:
xrandr --output Virtual1 --mode "1680x1050"