# Copy and paste support within VMWare



## KernelPanic (Nov 26, 2013)

Has anyone successfully set up clipboard support between a FreeBSD VM (9.2-RELEASE) and its VMWare Workstation host?

I've installed the VMWare Tools per this blog: (minus the /etc/make.conf command) http://www.rhyous.com/2012/05/09/instal ... hout-xorg/

When using WindowMaker, copy and paste between the Host and VM goes crazy after a while and the VM hangs. When using Xfce 4.10 copy and paste doesn't work at all. In both cases I'm running this command as part of starting up the window manager: `/usr/local/bin/vmware-user`. The user tools appear to be mostly functional because I get "multiple monitor" support in both environments.


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## KernelPanic (Nov 26, 2013)

Update on Xfce: I got it working by running the vmware-user tool after logging in. Apparently having it installed as part of the startup scripting is too early. Unfortunately, it behaves much in the same way as WindowMaker. After several copy and paste runs between the host and the VM, the VM hangs.


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## zongosaiba (Dec 1, 2013)

Greetings, 

I am also looking for a solution to this issue but to no avail.  FreeBSD 9.2 with KDE in VMware 10 . Everything else is working but the copy paste and drag.


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## KernelPanic (Dec 17, 2013)

I managed to get clipboard stable/functional by switching over to emulators/open-vm-tools and building everything (i.e. X.Org, XFce) from sources. Things were never stable with software installed via pkgng.

There are still some oddities: for text in terminal windows I can usually make it available to the host by selecting it multiple times. When that fails, I can pull up something like mousepad, middle click to paste the content and then use Copy from its Edit menu. The Edit -> Copy options built into applications like mousepad and firefox work as expected. Using Ctrl-C in those same applications is hit and miss (usually miss).

Pasting between the VM and the host (and visa versa) works correctly almost all of the time.

I have not tried drag&drop. I haven't really had a reason to try and move a file between my host (Windows 7) and my VM (FreeBSD 9).


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