Wednesday, October 3, 2012

VirtualBox Ubuntu Internet Connection and Shared Clipboard Conflict (OSX Mountain Lion)

Clipboard issue with OS X and VirtualBox

While I was working on the Ruby assignment in my online SE class, I was using Terminal running in Ubuntu VirtualBox. I firstly tried to copy the codes from the terminal to the external TexitEditor which was outside of the VirtualBox, but I could not.

Some specs about my computer and VM..

Laptop ---

Model: MacBook Air
System version:OS X 10.8.2
Processor Name: Intel Core i7
Processor Speed: 1.8 GHz
Number of Processors: 1
Total Number of Cores: 2
L2 Cache (per Core): 256 KB
L3 Cache: 4 MB
Memory:4 GB

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Virtual Machine ---

Name: VirtualBox
Version:4.1.20

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So, my professor and I tried to solve this issue and he found out that there is a way to share Clipboard with your OS and VirtualBox (Basically: Machine-> Settings -> Advanced(in General category) -> Shared Clipboard -> 'Bidirectional' as an option), and I rebooted the machine.

Became Worse Somehow...

Eventually in my case, the clipboard sharing was still unable, and moreover, it seemed like the Internet connection in VirtualBox was also down somehow. (I found out that later when I tried to work on my assignments on firefox installed in VirtualBox.), Sending ping request on Terminal seemed not working at all:
ping: unknown host www.google.com

Solution

Eventually by setting the Shared Clipboard option as 'disabled', the Internet Connection came back.

Shared clipboard system was kind of an important aspect for me since it sometimes is useful and at the same time crucial to be able to copy some of the codes from Terminal in Virtual machine and paste them to somewhere outside of the virtual machine.


Consideration..?

I think this issue raised some of the crucial problems here for at least those VM users running on Mac OS X (mine is Mountain Lion) that shared clipboard system is not available currently, and if you try to make it available for you, sometimes it disables your Internet connection in VM.. :(

2 comments:

  1. Thank you for this, I will now try to install ubuntu Virtual Box on my mac.

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    Replies
    1. You're welcome! :) I found out lately that ubuntu Virtual Box is very useful ..

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