Troubleshooting

There are many different issues that can arise when setting up Looking Glass. Below is a list of known issues with potential solutions:

When launching Looking Glass the desktop doesn’t appear

Make sure you meet the minimum requirements for using Looking Glass, especially regarding your guest GPU. See Connected Display for more details.

The clipboard is not working

Is clipboard synchronization enabled?
- Before you can copy or paste content between the guest and host, clipboard synchronization must be enabled.
Did you install the Spice Guest Tools?
- The SPICE Guest Tools driver must be installed on the host OS to synchronize the clipboard. The download is labeled “spice-guest-tools”.
  
  Warning
  
  Do NOT install the QEMU Guest Tools driver. These are not the same.
- Is it installed twice?
  - The Spice VDAgent is available in both Spice Guest Tools, and standalone as a separate installer. Check your installed programs and uninstall the VDAgent if it’s installed separately.

Keyboard shortcuts are not captured on GNOME Wayland

Capture mode may fail to capture compositor shortcuts like ALT+Tab or ALT+Middle Mouse - they go to GNOME instead of the guest VM.

When Looking Glass first requests to inhibit shortcuts, GNOME shows a dialog asking for permission. If you clicked “Deny” (or dismissed the dialog), GNOME permanently blocks the application and never shows the dialog again.

Use the flatpak command to view or grant the permission, this works even if LookingGlass is not a Flatpak application, as GNOME stores these permissions in Flatpak’s database:

flatpak permission-set gnome shortcuts-inhibitor looking-glass-client.desktop GRANTED

To verify the permission was set:

flatpak permissions gnome shortcuts-inhibitor