It's only available when Vim is compiled with +xclipboard support. I actually found that on an older version of CentOS (v4, I don't know if it's different in newer versions), the 'vim' command and the 'gvim' command were separately compiled binaries so that 'vim' command didn't share the +xclipboard support. On Debian/Ubuntu, I believe they are the same binary.
Exactly. On my machine (Ubuntu 11.04) the binary (/usr/bin/vim.basic) provided by the vim package is compiled with -clipboard -xterm_clipboard, and the binary (/usr/bin/vim.gnome) provided by vim-gnome is compiled with +clipboard +xterm_clipboard.
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It's only available when Vim is compiled with +xclipboard support. I actually found that on an older version of CentOS (v4, I don't know if it's different in newer versions), the 'vim' command and the 'gvim' command were separately compiled binaries so that 'vim' command didn't share the +xclipboard support. On Debian/Ubuntu, I believe they are the same binary.
Exactly. On my machine (Ubuntu 11.04) the binary (/usr/bin/vim.basic) provided by the vim package is compiled with -clipboard -xterm_clipboard, and the binary (/usr/bin/vim.gnome) provided by vim-gnome is compiled with +clipboard +xterm_clipboard.