Copy, Paste and Drag n Drop between Windows and VMWare Workstation Debian/Ubuntu VM

After creating a new Debian VM in VMWare workstation, Even after installing VMWare tools Copy/Paste, Drag n Drop from Windows Host to Debian VM was not working. It was painful to use the VM as you can’t share information between host and the VM.

After several trial and error method, here is what worked for me. Hope this would come in handy for others who are in same situation

• If open-vm-tools installed then remove the latter by running apt autoremove open-vm-tools –purge -y. Reboot the VM
• Install VMWare Tools, refer this link. Reboot the VM
• Install apt install open-vm-tools-desktop -y. Reboot the VM.

This worked like a charm. My host OS = Windows 10 and VM = Debian 10

Rebooting after each completing each step is not mandatory but I prefer to reboot even though its Linux 🙂

In addition tothe above steps, enable Shared Folders which may come handy at times.

Go to VM Settings > Options Tab > Shared Folders. Provide the folder path to share (make sure sensitive data is not inside the folder/folders) and set to ‘Always enabled’

Please read the warning message as shown in the image above and decide whether you want to use this feature or not.

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Image Credits: icon-library.net

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