You need to have Vim with the clipboard and xtermclipboard features compiled in. In Ubuntu, these are only available with the vim GUI packages (vim-gnome, vim-gtk, vim-athena, etc.).

Once you install one of these, you can copy to (and paste from) the clipboard registers (* and +). From this very informative post on Vi and Vim:

For X11-based systems (ie. Linux and most other UNIX-like
systems) there are 2 clipboards, which are independent of each other:

• PRIMARY - This is copy-on-select, and can be pasted with the middle mouse button.


• CLIPBOARD - This is copied with (usually) ^C, and pasted with ^V (It's like MS Windows).

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Vim has 2 special registers corresponding to these clipboards:

• * uses PRIMARY; mnemonic: star is select (for copy-on-select)


• + uses CLIPBOARD; mnemonic: CTRL + C (for the common keybind)

To copy to a register, you precede the copy command (y) with " and the name of the register (*, for example). "*y, then middle-click to paste, or "+y and ShiftInsert to paste.