I am using Ubuntu 12.04 Beta and Vim that has come with it. I am trying to use Vim to copy the content of a text file to Chrome browser. I have tried +, * y and all its variants. I have tried to :set clipboard=unnamed and :set clipboard=unnamedplus. Not working. I am not trying to use xclip, or GVim or any of that. I tried with xclip (not a standard package in Ubuntu 12.04), but that too does not work, also too much effort.

How do I copy the text to the clipboard and then paste anywhere, like Chrome?

Your version of Vim doesn't support X, which is required for clipboard access. By default, Ubuntu ships several builds of vim and only the GUI variant supports clipboard access. I always recompile vim from source so that a single vim (with symlinks for gvim etc) supports everything required (including :gui to switch from command line to GUI version). It's really very easy to do:

# Get the compile-dependencies of vim
sudo apt-get build-dep vim
# If you haven't got mercurial, get it
sudo apt-get install mercurial
# Get the source
hg clone https://vim.googlecode.com/hg/ vim_source
# Compile it
cd vim_source
./configure \
    --enable-perlinterp=dynamic \
    --enable-pythoninterp=dynamic \
    --enable-rubyinterp=dynamic \
    --enable-cscope \
    --enable-gui=auto \
    --enable-gtk2-check \
    --enable-gnome-check \
    --with-features=huge \
    --with-x \
    --with-compiledby="Your Name <youremail@domain.com>" \
    --with-python-config-dir=/usr/lib/python2.7/config
make && sudo make install

That will install it in /usr/local, so make sure that's in your PATH before /usr and it will be used instead of the Ubuntu versions.