Qemu/virtmanager + wm issue

Hey lads,

I don’t know where to ask for ideas, but I am pretty stuck.

I’m encountering a strange issue, which I am unable to resolve myself. It only occurs in the specific setup I am trying to achieve…

I’m running EndeavourOS with KDE as my host and Kali by using QEMU/KVM and Virt-Manger as guest. Since I need to copy and paste a lot of text during the usage of my Kali box, I usually enable shared clipboards by installing spice-vdagentd on the guest. And it works… sort of. Here is the strange issue.

If I am running the Guest (Kali) with either XFCE or KDE, the shared clipboard works out of the box after installing spice-vdagentd. However, I’d prefer to have a WM rather than a DE within that Kali machine, so I installed i3. Once logged into the System with an i3 session, shared clipboard does not work anymore. Services are started, nothing else is changed. If I logout and login back with KDE or XFCE the shared clipboard works again.

Alternatively I tried to install bspwm, but the exact same issue occurs.

I just have no clue what else to try. Anyone got any idea what this could cause or how to fix this? I’d really love to go for a wm within my guest…

Cheers

Does i3 need something like xclip to provide a clipboard?

I don’t know, but the clipboard within the VM itself works fine (can copy from tty, firefox, etc), but the clipboard(s) are not shared between host & guest.

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