Ubuntu
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Copy and Past in Unity on Precise

Asked by GNAServicesInc

I just upgraded to Precise and have a problem that I did not have before, copy and past fails about 1/4 of the time. I will experience problem and note what I did and then attempt to repeat the steps and it will work. As a result so far I can't determine a list of steps to reproduce the problem reliably.

At first I was blaming myself thinking I must have pressed the wrong key or fat fingered the keyboard etc. So to eliminate that as a factor I began using either "copy" from the menu shown when right clicking or manually selecting "copy" from the "edit" menu and still about 1/3 of the time I copy something when I go to past the clipboard is empty. How I choose "copy" seems to have no effect either way.

I have had the problem occur bolt when copying and pasting between applications as well as when copying and pasting within the same application. I have experience the problem when copying text, images, etc as well as entire files and/or directories.

I have searched around and found a few old reports of people experience similar problems on older versions of Ubuntu. Most have not had yielded anything useful. However I did find, https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+question/33469

It is from 2008 and references thing to do under Gnome / KDE desktop. I am running the Unity desktop, are the suggestions made in 33469 still relevant?

I would really love to nail this down but I am unsure of where to look or how to best troubleshoot this. It seems to happen almost randomly and as so a result I have so far been unsuccessful in figuring out a set of steps that reliably reproduce the problem.

Any advice or ideas on where I should look or thing I should test for or ideas / advice on how to proceed etc. would be helpful and appreciated.

Thanks in advance for your time and for sharing your knowledge!

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Barry Drake (b-drake) said : 		#1

What method did you use to upgrade? It sounds to me as though the upgrade was not 100% successful. Could you consider a clean install from the DVD image?

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GNAServicesInc (gnaservicesinc) said : 		#2

I apologize, I miss spoke when I said I "upgraded", it just feels that way because of the way settings are preserved. Because I have, as suggested, my home partition on a separate partition and because I have had things go wrong in upgrades in the past, and because I wanted to get ride of unused packages, when I "upgraded" what I actually did was format my '/' partition and kept my '/home'. So in reality it was a clean install with the exception of my home partition.

Saying that actually gives me an idea, do you suppose the problem might be the result of an old dot file in my home folder? If so, I would like to persevere as many of the preference / dot files as possible and not just blanket delete all of the dot files. If the problem might be from a old settings file in a dot file do you have any suggestions on what ones would be most likely the cause. If so then I will move of the likely ones one at a time until I fix the problem. Or do you think that I am barking up the wrong tree with the dot file?

Also, knowing more about how I did the install do you still think something went wrong with the install?, if you do then I can clean install again.

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Sam_ (and-sam) said : 		#3

To exclude user misconfiguration test if the behaviour remains in guest account and unity-2d.
On user account maybe rename everything which has something to do with gtk-2.0, rather legacy files and custom xinput files.

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