Enabling copy/paste on an Ubuntu VM on VMware Workstation
I used to be a .NET developer. Nowaways, I am a DevOps solutions architect with a focus on Azure and Kubernetes.
I also love productivity topics, especially when it comes to doing more with less of my time. I'm also a daddy, so time is a limited resource for me.
This is a bit of a miscellaneous post. I’ve had some trouble making my copy/paste work on a Ubuntu VM and hopefully it will help someone.
Installing VMware tools
First, make sure you have VMware tools installed.
sudo service vmware-tools status
If it’s not installed, then first make sure you don’t have the open-vm-tools installed.
sudo service open-vm-tools status
If you do have it installed, uninstall it.
sudo apt-get remove open-vm-tools
sudo apt-get remove --auto-remove open-vm-tools
sudo apt-get purge open-vm-tools
sudo apt-get purge --auto-remove open-vm-tools
sudo reboot
Then, after your computer reboots, you can install the VMware tools. If you didn't have open-vm-tools, you can skip to this step.
Click on Virtual Machine > Install / Update / Reinstall VMware Tools. Extract the VMware Tools tar to the Desktop and follow the below commands.
cd Desktop/vmware-tools-distrib
Run this command to install VMware Tools:
sudo ./vmware-install.pl
Follow the prompts to install. I picked the defaults.
Reboot your computer and copy/paste should work with the default window manager.
i3
If you use i3 as a window manager, go to the i3 config at ~/.config/i3/config and add the following line at the end. (This assumes you already had an i3 configuration file created).
exec --no-startup-id vmware-user
Log out and log back in.
That’s it! Goodluck!
