# Enabling copy/paste on an Ubuntu VM on VMware Workstation

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!