How to Paste in Ubuntu Headless Virtual Machine

I’m sure many of you have had the same problem as me: you’re trying to paste into an Ubuntu headless virtual machine, but it just doesn’t work.

No matter what you do, the clipboard just doesn’t seem to be shared between your host and guest OS. Well, today I’m here to share with you the solution to this problem.

It’s actually quite simple – all you need to do is install the xclip package on your Ubuntu guest. Once you’ve done that, paste away to your heart’s content!

How to Paste in Ubuntu Headless Virtual Machine

Introduction

If you’re running Ubuntu in a headless virtual machine, you may need to paste text into the VM from time to time. Unfortunately, this isn’t always straightforward.

In this article, we’ll show you two methods for copying and pasting text into a headless Ubuntu VM: using the command line and using a third-party tool.

Basic steps

  1. Download the pbcopy brought by Apple. It should be a single executable file.
  2. From the Ubuntu command line, use scp to copy it to your ubuntu machine. I’ll assume it’s in your home directory.
  3. In ubuntu, make the file executable with chmod +x pbcopy
  4. Finally, run the program with ./pbcopy This blog post tells how to enable copy & paste between tmux running in an Ubuntu VM and the OS X terminal

Tips and tricks


If you are using Ubuntu in a virtual machine, you may find it useful to know how to copy and paste between your host machine and your guest machine. This can be done with a few simple steps.

  1. On your host machine, highlight the text you want to copy.
  2. Press the “Ctrl” and “C” keys at the same time to copy the text.
  3. On your Ubuntu guest machine, press the “Ctrl” and “Shift” keys at the same time, then press the “V” key. This will paste the text into your Ubuntu guest machine.

More advanced methods

If you’re a more advanced user, you might want to try a more sophisticated method of copying and pasting between your host and guest machines.

This can be done using a program called ClipIt, which is available for free from the Ubuntu Software Center.

Once you’ve installed ClipIt, open it and go to the ‘General’ tab. Make sure that the ‘Enable copy/paste’ option is checked.

You can also check the ‘Synchronize clipboards‘ option if you want to be able to paste between your host and guest machines without having to use the ClipIt interface.

Now go to the ‘Advanced‘ tab and scroll down to the ‘Copy/paste mode‘ section. Here you can choose whether you want to use the ‘Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V’ keyboard shortcuts or right-click menu commands for copying and pasting.

Choose whichever method you’re most comfortable with and then click ‘OK‘.

You should now be able to copy and paste between your host and guest machines using the method you selected.

Conclusion


There are many benefits to using a headless virtual machine, such as the ability to manage and scale multiple servers easily and efficiently.

If you’re running an Ubuntu server, you can use the following tips to help you paste text into your headless VM.

First, if you’re using an SSH client like PuTTY, you can simply highlight the text you want to copy and then click the right mouse button. This will automatically copy the text to your clipboard.

If you’re not using an SSH client, you can use the xclip utility to copy and paste text. To install xclip, simply run the following command:

sudo apt-get install xclip

Once xclip is installed, you can use the following command to copy text to your clipboard:

xclip -sel clip < file.txt

To paste the text into your VM, simply run the following command:

xclip -sel clip -o

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