How do I paste text into the terminal of arch vbox?

Gew · 2026-01-27 11:28:21

I followed the wiki for installing using pacman of the guest utils and ran the service to start the clipboard (VBoxClient --clipboard) but nothing happened.

Not sure what to do next? I only want to be able to copy and paste text to terminal as I am not going to be using a desktop.

PS.
For reference szlash background you can see this ( https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=208706 ) now closed thread that I have (not gonna lie) pretty much copy-pasted (no pun intended), since my issue revolves exactly that. Forum rules does not allow necro-bumping though, and since that was ten years ago it's better to make a new thread.

seth · 2026-01-27 13:08:28

For reference, https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Virtua … t_services
Sanity check: are you running an X11 or a wayland session inseide and does it work w/ X11?

Gew · 2026-01-27 13:19:23

Thanks for your input! ?

No, I've got no X11/X whatsoever installed. This particular setup just consists of a tiny little VM, not much moer than the bare fundamentals (base, linux, linux-firmware) installed. I have no intention to have X environment of any kind, but just raw TTY / console. It's just frustrating, I'm on tutorial pages in my main OS (Windows) which gives me long strings of commands to do various things, and I simply want to be able to CTRL+C those in Windows and paste it into the console in the virtual machine, not having to type everything over. And no, reading those tutorial pages from the console (elinks or whatever) is not an option. Hmmm, is what I intend to do really so hard?

seth · 2026-01-27 13:24:10

I severely doubt that you'll be able to do any clipboard on the VT at all - let alone via virtualbox.
If you don't plan on using a GUI at all you could simply access the VM via ssh?

Gew · 2026-01-27 15:09:27

seth wrote:

If you don't plan on using a GUI at all you could simply access the VM via ssh?

Fair point, that would do the trick.

Arch Linux

#1 2026-01-27 11:28:21

How do I paste text into the terminal of arch vbox?

#2 2026-01-27 13:08:28

Re: How do I paste text into the terminal of arch vbox?

#3 2026-01-27 13:19:23

Re: How do I paste text into the terminal of arch vbox?

#4 2026-01-27 13:24:10

Re: How do I paste text into the terminal of arch vbox?

#5 2026-01-27 15:09:27

Re: How do I paste text into the terminal of arch vbox?

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