Fix Clipboard, Copy Paste & Drag and Drop in KVM Virtual Machine Manager (Fedora / Linux)
In this video I show how to enable clipboard sharing, drag & drop and shared folders in Virtual Machine Manager (KVM/QEMU) on Linux.
This allows you to easily copy text between the host and virtual machine, transfer files using drag & drop and share folders between systems.
Tested on Fedora 43 running in a VM, but it works on other Linux distributions like Debian and Ubuntu.
Steps covered:
Enable clipboard sharing
Enable drag & drop
Configure shared folders
Tools used:
Virtual Machine Manager (virt-manager)
KVM / QEMU virtualization
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Install Virtual Machine Manager
sudo dnf install virt-manager @virtualization
sudo systemctl enable --now libvirtd
sudo usermod -aG libvirt $USER
Enable Clipboard + Drag & Drop (SPICE)
Fedora 43 VM:
sudo dnf install spice-vdagent
sudo systemctl enable --now spice-vdagentd
Debian:
sudo apt install spice-vdagentd
VM Settings:
Display → SPICE
Video device → Virtio (or QXL)
Shared Folder (virtiofs)
On host:
mkdir ~/Shared
On Fedora VM:
sudo mkdir -p /mnt/shared
sudo mount -t virtiofs shared /mnt/shared
ls /mnt/shared
Mount automatically at boot:
Edit /etc/fstab:
shared /mnt/shared virtiofs defaults 0 0
Save and reboot.