Comment 11 for bug 665552

I've just tried this on a Natty i386 system with empathy 2.34.0-0ubuntu3, and I can reproduce this bug as well. I was able to reproduce it in all four available session types: Ubuntu, Ubuntu Classic, Ubuntu Classic (no effects), and Safe Mode. Since only the first of these session types uses Unity, it seems that Unity is not the cause of this problem after all.

I was able to select text and copy it to the clipboard by right-clicking on it and clicking Copy. Then I was able to paste it with Ctrl+V. I was able to select text without copying it to the clipboard, and paste it by clicking the middle mouse button. Furthermore, when I selected text in Empathy and copied it to the clipboard (by right-clicking and clicking Copy), and then selected text in the Terminal, and then clicked the middle mouse button in Empathy, it pasted the text from the Terminal. When I pressed Ctrl+V immediately thereafter, it pasted the text that I'd copied to the clipboard earlier. Except the failure of Ctrl+C (which certainly is a bug), this is all perfectly normal and correct behavior--it's just behavior that many Ubuntu users are not aware of. In X11, there are (actually more than) two clipboards--one which uses Copy and Paste, and the other which uses selection and (by default) middle-clicking. (This is somewhat obfuscated by how, when there's nothing that's been copied by selection, in some applications middle-clicking will paste whatever is in the Copy-and-Paste clipboard; that leads many people to think of Ctrl+V and middle-click as though they are equivalent, even though they are not.) See http://wiki.tcl.tk/1217 for a quick technical explanation of how this works, and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_selection for more detailed information.

The conclusion of that last paragraph: This bug has nothing to do with *pasting* functionality (even though Alexander Gnodtke reported being able to paste by middle-clicking). Only copying functionality via Ctrl+C is affected, and it appears to be (or have been) affected in precisely the same way for everyone who has experienced this bug.