How to enable Shared Clipboard & Drag-and-Drop features inside VirtualBox with Whonix-LXQt-18.0.8.7?

VirtualBox
104

Hi,

I’ve had persistent problems with clipboard sharing in Whonix-Workstation with LXQt/labwc (Wayland): sometimes it worked, but often it didn’t.

Today I switched to the developers repository and upgraded to see whether that would help. This updated Guest Additions to 7.2.18, but afterwards vboxclient-wayland.service failed to start.

Installed versions from trixie-developers:

  • vm-config-dist: 3:18.4-1
  • virtualbox-guest-additions-iso: 1:7.2.18.1-1
  • VBoxClient --version: 7.2.18r175117

The service currently tries to run:

/usr/bin/VBoxClient --foreground --wayland

This exits with status 2:

VBoxClient: error: Unknown option: '--wayland'

The help output instead lists --clipboard and --session-type, with auto, x11, and wayland as supported session types.

After stopping the service, I tested:

/usr/bin/VBoxClient --clipboard --session-type wayland --foreground

Clipboard sharing worked with this command.

The workaround is to override the service’s ExecStart using:

systemctl --user edit vboxclient-wayland.service

with the following contents:

[Service]
ExecStart=
ExecStart=/usr/bin/VBoxClient --clipboard --session-type wayland --foreground

Then reload and restart the service:

systemctl --user daemon-reload
systemctl --user reset-failed vboxclient-wayland.service
systemctl --user restart vboxclient-wayland.service

It looks like the packaged service needs an updated command for this Guest Additions version. Could you check this?

Thanks!

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