Windows – Why can’t I share the clipboard using TightVNC server on Windows from Mac’s screen sharing

clipboardmacostightvncwindows

I have the TightVNC server running on Windows 7 Home Edition and I'm using Screen Sharing on Mac OS X. On the Mac, the clipboard sharing button is greyed out:

If I copy and paste in either OS, the clipboard isn't transmitted. There appear to be no options in the TightVNC server configuration.

Any ideas how to get clipboard sharing to work?

Edit: Clipboard sharing works fine if I use the TightVNC viewer from a Windows machine. However, there's no TightVNC client for Mac OS X.

Best Answer

Occasionally TightVNC Server seems to end up with multiple processes.

Check in task man - how may VNC Server processes are running on the server.
If you can identify the real one, kill the others.
If not - stop them all (you will need physical/KVM access to do this).
Start them again.

It's possible that as TightVNC Server can run as an app or service, you may have the app in your startup and the service on auto, so two get started. You will need to remove one of them.

Related Solutions

Macos – Sharing the Mac OS X clipboard with the internal X server

You can enable clipboard sync by editing ~/Library/Preferences/org.x.X11.plist and adding the following five boolean keys1 (and checking them).

sync_clipboard_to_pasteboard
sync_pasteboard
sync_pasteboard_to_clipboard
sync_pasteboard_to_primary
sync_primary_on_select

Restart X11 and they should be synchronized properly.

Edit: You can add the keys either with the Property List Editor or with the following Terminal commands:

defaults write org.x.X11 sync_clipboard_to_pasteboard -boolean true
defaults write org.x.X11 sync_pasteboard -boolean true
defaults write org.x.X11 sync_pasteboard_to_clipboard -boolean true
defaults write org.x.X11 sync_pasteboard_to_primary -boolean true
defaults write org.x.X11 sync_primary_on_select -boolean true

An alternative solution is to install the latest version of XQuartz which exposes these options through the X11 Preferences >> Pasteboard panel.

Copy/Paste (Clipboard like) functionality from a VNC desktop

This should work if you've got vncconfig running as a VNC client application. The man page clearly states that it is required for X clipboard support, so make sure that ~/.vnc/xstartup on the server side contains the following line somewhere:

vncconfig -iconic &

to ensure it's started automatically. If you already have a running VNC session without an active instance of vncconfig, just open a terminal on your VNC desktop and start it manually.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Macos – Sharing the Mac OS X clipboard with the internal X server

Copy/Paste (Clipboard like) functionality from a VNC desktop

Related Question