Clipboard Copy and Paste does not work in VMWare Player 12

Question

i can copy and paste text and files between Virtuelle Maschine (Windows 7) and my local Windows 7. But I can't copy this what is in clipboard - for example between two displays the same program (on display in Virtuale Maschine and second display in local Windows).

I have no option: VM > Options tab > Guest Isolation > Enable the Copy and paste

In VMWare Workstation it's worked but not in VMWare Player. How to fix it ?

Grebe

Answer 1

EDIT: This is my routine now to fix it:

VM:

$ apt-get autoremove open-vm-tools $ apt-get install open-vm-tools $ apt --fix-broken install

Close VM.

In Windows Host:

echo off | clip

Start VM.

Hopefully works for you too.

Chock

Answer 2

As of Aug'2023:

Install the right package:

• VMWare recommends using "open-vm-tools" instead of "VMWare Tools" on Ubuntu.
• open-vm-tools-desktop is the package that provides drag-n-drop/clipboard sharing functionality.

So sudo apt-get install open-vm-tools-desktop is what you need.

open-vm-tools is also needed, but it is a dependency of open-vm-tools-desktop so gets installed implicitly.

---

Start/restart the right daemon (vmtoolsd):

In my case I had two instances of vmtoolsd running.

$ ps -eaf | grep vmtoolsd
  UID   PID  PPID   C STIME   TTY           TIME CMD
root       15281       1  0 Aug10 ?        00:03:58 /usr/bin/vmtoolsd
kash       15545     978  0 Aug10 ?        00:03:44 /usr/bin/vmtoolsd -n vmusr --blockFd 3 --uinputFd 4
$

• sudo systemctl restart open-vm-tools (or sudo service open-vm-tools restart) restarts the first daemon (running as root). This does nothing (copy paste still doesn't work).
• What worked was to restart the "user" process. In my case the one running as kash:

$ my_uid=`id -u`
$ kill -9 $(ps -u $my_uid | grep vmtoolsd | awk '{print $1}')
$ /usr/bin/vmtoolsd -n vmusr --blockFd 3 --uinputFd 4 -b /var/run/user/$my_uid/vmtoolsd.pid

Values of fds taken from the original process that was killed.

---

My env:

$ lsb_release --all
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description:    Ubuntu 22.04.3 LTS
Release:        22.04
Codename:       jammy
$

Evaginate

Answer 3

If you have VMware Workstation Pro make sure you don't have it disabled in the settings: VM > Options tab > Guest Isolation > Enable the Copy and paste

Eastwardly

The same information I founded in Google. But unfortunately I don't have options "Guest Isolation". Maybe Guest Isolation ist in wmware Workstation but not in Player ? – Grebe

I addes screenshot, can you schow me where is the option ? – Grebe

"Guest Isolation" is only available with Workstation Pro – Manley