If you have recently upgraded your Kali Linux and/or VirtualBox itself, you probably run into the issue that your Shared Clipboard stopped working. This happened to me inconveniently often in the last 2 months or so, so I decided to do some research and find a fix – and I did. If your VirtualBox Shared Clipboard Stopped Working in Kali Linux 2020.1 (or any other Debian based distribution), this is the solution.

I don’t get why VirtualBox keeps messing this up, but I am appreciative of their free software. Let’s dive right in.

I write this tutorial with VirtualBox Version 6.1.4 r136177 (Qt5.6.2)

1 – Downgrade VirtualBox Extension Pack

The good thing is, we don’t need to downgrade VirtualBox itself, but only the VirtualBox Extension Pack. I remembered which version was the last working for me and downgraded to that. You can find all old VirtualBox versions here, but we particularly need to download this one. Just download and install it, make sure you have no Virtual Machine running while doing that. It only takes a second.

2 – Downgrade VirtualBox Guest Additions on Kali Linux

Alright, fire up Kali Linux or any other Linux Distro you want to fix. Open a Terminal and follow me through.

sudo apt remove -y virtualbox-guest-x11 virtualbox-guest-dkms virtualbox-guest-utils

sudo reboot now

Back up, start a terminal again.

cd downloads

wget https://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/6.1.2/VBoxGuestAdditions_6.1.2.iso

sudo mkdir /media/iso

sudo mount VBoxGuestAdditions_6.1.2.iso /media/iso -o loop

sudo /media/iso/VBoxLinuxAdditions.run

sudo reboot now

After going through this, your shared clipboard should be working again! Now to prevent this happening again the next time we run apt upgrade, we can exclude the Guest Additions from the Upgrade process.

3 – Excluding VirtualBox Guest Additions from APT Upgrade

Open a terminal again.

sudo apt-mark hold virtualbox-guest-x11 virtualbox-guest-dkms virtualbox-guest-utils

To reverse this, once VirtualBox fixed their sh**.

sudo apt-mark unhold virtualbox-guest-x11 virtualbox-guest-dkms virtualbox-guest-utils

Conclusion

There you have it. If your VirtualBox Shared Clipboard Stopped Working, you now know where to find a solution 🙂

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