Latest VirtualBox 1.4 was released on June 5th, and it is the youngest virtualization player. If you are not aware of this products, VirtualBox is a family of powerful x86 virtualization products for enterprise as well as home use and is available both as open source under the GPL and under a commercial license which, in most cases, allows you to use the product free of charge. Compiled binaries for different Linux distributions and Windows are available from the project’s download page.
With this new edition innotek officially enters the Apple market, already seeing competition between Parallels, with its Desktop solution, and VMware, with its upcoming Fusion, introducing support for Mac OS X (still in beta). This version contains lots of improvements and bug fixing. Here is the sample list of new features and changes in this release:
- Full support for 64-bit Linux
- RDP session shadowing
- Clipboard synchronization
- Serial ports and easier Linux host interface networking
- VirtualBox now supports VMware disk images (VMDK) natively and can give virtual machines access to physical disks and partitions (”raw disk support”)
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (RHEL5) and Xandros Desktop 4.1 are now officially supported
- Added support for OS X hosts
- Signed all executables and device drivers on Windows
- Added user interface for Shared Folders
- Improved keyboard handling on Linux hosts
- Added first run wizard
- Restore original window size when returning from fullscreen mode
- Fixed screen update when switching to fullscreen mode
Besides these changes there are many more changelog.
Personally I haven’t given a try to VirtualBox on an extensive level but can say that compared to Vmware’s Workstation, my preferred virtualisation (for now), VirtualBox lacks in performance, but then again you can get it for free … so do give it a try.
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