Cut and paste disabled in fedora 30

I believe this is the solution. The problem I suspected was introduced turned out to be non-existent.

I have added this information to bugzilla report 1714334 – "select" function stopped working after last update on May 24, 2019.

My work around was to reinstall fedora 30 from scratch. The cut and past function works again.

The solution suggested by ptrck4193/ works with Cinnamon and LXDE. Probably works anytime the clipboard icon is available.

What package is that bug filed against? The “Terminal” package is an orphan (has no maintainer), so no one is going to look at that particular bug.

Bug Report 1714334 filed under “Terminal”. It was not clear what terminal came up under Cinnamon. Also, correction made via Clipboard Management and the bug affects more than just “Terminal”.

I think I commented on the bug report already—“terminal” is not a package, and bugs must be filed against specific packages. Otherwise the maintainers will not receive a notification. So, what terminal are you using?

(Anyone else here on Cinnamon who may be able to provide this information? I suspect it’s Gnome-terminal, but I’m not sure)

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Someone remarked, sometimes the fix is very simple. For me, finding this link solved my problem:

http://irawoodring.net/fedora-xfce4-and-clipit-wayland/

It’s a brief explanation of how an older clipboard manager, “clipit” interferes with current Fedora. So, if had an older installation, see if it’s installed, then remove it. Reboot after removal. The link points to further explanation.

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Wish I’d just looked for the answer first. That would have been too easy though. Can confirm that it was the Clipboard manager that I okayed during installation. Once removed copy paste functionality returned everywhere.

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Well, it’s like when someone calls the help desk and it looks like there’s some really complicated issue. and it turns out
to be that the power cable is unplugged. It better when it’s a simple thing.

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I just installed Fedora 32 and ran into the same problem. It seems like selinux policy is preventing copy and paste from working. The default mode for selinux is ‘enforced’. As a workaround, I temporarily set the selinux mode to ‘permissive’. Now copy and paste work normally.

sudo setenforce permissive

Hi Paul,

This is quite odd and I couldn’t find any bug report about it - I’d say it’s copying getting disabled is too high profile to go unnoticed.
Did you do an upgrade or was this a clean install? What desktop environment are you running? Is it on Wayland or X11?

Could you please perform the following steps to help figure out what’s going on?

See which version of selinux-policy you have installed:
rpm -q selinux-policy

Put SELinux back in enforcing mode:
sudo setenforce 1

Reboot and try to copy & paste some text. If it doesn’t work because of SELinux, you should be able to see the denials with this:
sudo ausearch -i -m avc,user_avc,selinux_err,user_selinux_err -ts boot

If there are indeed SELinux denials, try relabeling your filesystem;
sudo fixfiles -B onboot
and reboot.

Does the problem persist?

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I did a clean install of Fedora 32 LXDE Spin. I’ve been using this system for about 5 days after the clean install. The selinux-policy is:
selinux-policy-3.14.5-38.fc32.noarch
I had to type this just now, because copy and paste quit working after I rebooted and my system went back to ‘enforcing’ mode again. Installing the latest updates with DNF didn’t help. I’ll try running fixfiles to see if that helps.

I didn’t try ausearch, but I ran
sudo fixfiles -B onboot
I was able to copy sudo fixfiles -B onboot from your post and paste the previous line. ‘fixfiles’ seemed to have worked sort of, I tried copying and pasting different stuff 3 times before it worked again So, copy and paste seems to work sometimes now, but it’s intermittent.

Just for the heck of it, I ran

sudo setenforce permissive

again. I am able to copy and paste text in Firefox without problems. So I ran

sudo setenforce enforcing

again and now copy and paste are back to being intermittent.

I ran the ausearch command from above, and here are the results:

type=USER_AVC msg=audit(05/24/2020 17:30:30.990:266) : pid=829 uid=dbus auid=unset ses=unset subj=system_u:system_r:system_dbusd_t:s0-s0:c0.c1023 msg='avc:  received setenforce notice (enforcing=0)  exe=/usr/bin/dbus-broker sauid=dbus hostname=? addr=? terminal=?' 
----
type=USER_AVC msg=audit(05/24/2020 17:32:06.990:270) : pid=829 uid=dbus auid=unset ses=unset subj=system_u:system_r:system_dbusd_t:s0-s0:c0.c1023 msg='avc:  received setenforce notice (enforcing=1)  exe=/usr/bin/dbus-broker sauid=dbus hostname=? addr=? terminal=?' 

I had to retry copying and pasting this text from the terminal window into Firefox twice before it worked. To copy and paste, I am holding down the left mouse button and dragging it over the text to highlight it, then I click the right mouse button and select Copy from the popup menu, then I click the right mouse button and click Paste in the popup menu. I am using a generic USB mouse, but I get the same results using the laptop’s touch pad and buttons. The laptop is a Dell Latitude 3340 with a Core i3.

Since we’ve established that SELinux gives you different results in enforcing and permissive mode, you should file a bug against selinux-policy and maybe the maintainer could help you troubleshoot this problem.

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I see lots of others complain about copy and paste not working in Fedora. Also, I don’t really need high security on a home laptop that nobody else uses. Fedora seems like more hassle than other distros. So, I decided to give up on Fedora and install Linux Mint as my main OS instead.

A post was split to a new topic: Fedora 32: copy/paste issues