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DESCRIPTION
VirtualBox is a family of powerful x86 virtualization products for enterprise as well as home use. Not only is VirtualBox an extremely feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers, it is also the only professional solution that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL).
Presently, VirtualBox runs on Windows, Linux and Macintosh hosts and supports a large number of guest operating systems including but not limited to Windows (NT 4.0, 2000, XP, Server 2003, Vista), DOS/Windows 3.x, Linux (2.4 and 2.6), and OpenBSD.
VirtualBox is being actively developed with frequent releases and has an ever growing list of features, supported guest operating systems and platforms it runs on. VirtualBox is a community effort backed by a dedicated company: everyone is encouraged to contribute while innotek ensures the product always meets professional quality criteria.
WHAT'S NEW
Version 3.2.8: - VMM: properly terminate the VM with an error if the guest is trying to switch to the PAE mode but PAE is disabled in the VM settings
- GUI: switch to native file dialogs (Windows hosts only; bug #5459)
- GUI: don't use native file dialogs on KDE hosts (Linux hosts only; bug #6809)
- 3D support: fixed GL_EXT_texture_sRGB support
- PXE: fixed ZENworks PXE boot regression
- OVF: fixed slower export and larger images under certain circumstances (3.2.6 regression; bug #7073)
- USB: properly signal an interrupt if the port suspend status changes
- USB: respect the remote-only filter
- USB: avoid VM hang when changing the configuration of certain devices (Windows hosts only)
- USB: fix a crash with older Linux kernels and non-ASCII characters in device strings (Linux hosts only; bug #6983)
- PageFusion: fixed conflict with the guest execution feature
- PageFusion: fixed stability issues with a large number of VMs
- PageFusion: fixed host crashes with guest SMP and Win64 guests
- Memory ballooning: fixed problems restoring VMs with pre-allocation enabled
- Bridged networking: fixed performance issue with GRO enabled on bridged device (bug #7059)
- Hostonly networking: fixed performance issue (3.2.6 regression; bug #7081)
- Hard disks: fix auto-reset of immutable disk at VM startup (bug #6832)
- BusLogic: several fixes for Windows NT/2000 and SCO OpenServer guests
- LsiLogic: fixed I/O errors under rare circumstances
- Sharing disks: support for attaching one disk to several VMs without external tools and tricks
- Shared folders: several fixes and performance enhancements for Solaris guests (bugs #4154 and #6512)
- Solaris Installer: added support for remote installations
- Guest Properties API: correctly support enumerating the properties of a running VM with an empty "patterns" field (bug #7171)
- Guest properties: properly delete transient properties on shutdown
- RDP video redirection performance improvements and stability fixes
- Settings: silently fix host audio driver when reading machine XML settings files or OVF written by VirtualBox on a different host OS, for example convert DirectSound to PulseAudio (bug #7209)
- Settings: properly store the NAT network setting in XML settings file version 1.10 and later (bug #6176)
- VBoxManage: handle differencing images with parent UUID correctly in subcommand openmedium disk (bug #6751)
- Web service: enabled HTTP keepalive for much better performance
- Web service: added timestamps to logging output
- Web service: treat 8-bit strings as UTF-8 not ASCII
- X11 Additions: fix for Xorg 6.8 guests (e.g. RHEL4)
REQUIREMENTS
Mac OS X 10.4 or later.
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| VirtualBox User Reviews (51 posts) | Write A Review |
 | Aug 30 2010 |
MLBKXBX I must point out that this is one of those rare applications that can't be run from anywhere but the Applications folder. If you like to sort your applications in to subfolders (of the Applications folder), then with virtualbox, this is a no-go situation. I'd be very happy if someone (with an account) reopened a bug against version 3 in the bugtracker, since i'm not too keen on registering an account on yet another bugtracker. The old bug (version 2) was reported here; http://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/2054
(Version 3.2.8) | |
| [ Reply ] | |
 | Aug 9 2010 |
CEEBEE I'm not an expert nor a noob but the only thing VB seems to have going for it is its price. After installing Ubuntu 10.04, screwing around with it for two hours, I still had no sound, awkward file and document sharing to the Mac desktop, and a window resizing problem. My experiences with VMWare Fusion and Parallels were as uncomplicated as this was painful. Software shouldn't be this much of a pain in the a*s to use, even if it is free. Save yourself the grief.
(Version 3.2.8) | |
| [ Reply ] | |
| May 5 2010 |
PIZZACAKE The multi-monitor support works great for me with Windows XP, you get two windows and can even go into seamless mode! Haven't tried Mac OS X virtualization yet but appreciate having it available.
(Version 3.2.0_BETA1) | |
| [ Reply ] | |
 | Apr 23 2010 |
GITTEBOY Does not seem to support i5 quadcore. Only uses one core. Is this a known issue or a know feature?
(Version 3.1.6) | |
| [ 3 Replies - Reply ] | |
Replies:
| May 4 2010 |
E_COMMERCE Not sure, although just to be pedantic the Core i5 is dual core with hyperthreading, not quad core. Details like that matter to virtualization software, even if we don't have to think of them day to day.
(Version 3.2.0-BETA1) | |
| May 20 2010 |
NITRO_M Don't pay to much attention to E_COMMERCE, it seems as if he don't know what he's talking about, there are most certainly quadcore i5's, i5-750 and i5-750S, read more at intels site http://ark.intel.com/Product.aspx?id=42915. Why you can't get more than one core active could be your virtual machine settings, have you given the virtual 2 or more cores to use?
(Version 3.2.0) | |
| Jun 2 2010 |
E_COMMERCE I stand corrected; I was thinking of the mobile processors rather than desktop. Indeed, the first Core-i5 system Apple shipped was available in a quad-core version. So no, I did not know what I was talking about. :-)
(Version 3.2.2) | |
Replies:
| Mar 25 2010 |
UMIJIN When will you be willing to pay for features like that? :-P
(Version 3.1.6) | |
| May 4 2010 |
E_COMMERCE I don't know, I think that was a fair response. Supporting a Bootcamp partition within a virtualization program (and doing it properly) is non-trivial. It's also of limited use for VirtualBox, since it is designed to run on many different platforms and this would be of use only on the Mac. Really, if you need that functionality, there is perfectly good software that will do it for you - it's just not free. For pretty much any other use, VirtualBox has matured nicely.
(Version 3.2.0-BETA1) | |
| Mar 25 2010 |
26CAB40 When they get it to address Firewire correctly, I'm in.
(Version 3.1.6) | |
| [ Reply ] | |
| Feb 13 2010 |
YAPPA This is my preferred (stable) solution for running PC stuff on my Mac. WINE is great too but needs to mature a bit more, it therefore requires a lot of updating and command line manipulation. 3D games run great with WINE though, if you can get them to work at all. For the best performance from demanding USB devices (e.g. DVB-T USB TV Tuner stick) VMWare outperforms all others according to my testing.
(Version 3.1.4) | |
| [ Reply ] | |
| Jan 26 2010 |
NULLSET Shoot, what can I say, I'm impressed. I own both VMWare and Parallels (newest versions of each) and VirtualBox appears to be both faster *and* less memory hungry than both of these products. Haven't used VirtualBox extensively yet, but from what I see so far I'm actually looking forward to using Windows occasionally (at least as much as a person *can* look forward to using Windows).
(Version 3.1.2) | |
| [ Reply ] | |
| Dec 12 2009 |
ANDY HEWITT I feel I have been wasting my money on Fusion and Parallels, having bought both in MU Bundles this year, then having to buy the updates soon after. Getting expensive that is. I only bought VMWare Fusion because of the rave reviews. Today I've been reinstalling VirtualBox with WinXP, having used it before, and then onto Parallels for a while. There are a few things in the commercial offerings that may benefit some, but not here. Parallels was OK, but for some reason I just couldn't get Fusion to work well at all. VirtualBox 3.1 is at least as fast as Parallels (a bit faster if anything), and actually a lot faster than a dedicated PC I have here too, and everything I need is working just fine in it. It is a tiny bit more fiddly to get everything working, such as shared folders, but it does all work. If your needs are modest, don't waste your money on the others, this works OK. Just IMHO of course. Get the demos and decide for yourself.
(Version 3.1.0) | |
| [ Reply ] | |
| Oct 29 2009 |
SURFSPIRIT Ya This Apps is Great, But Has a Huge Fail! Don't Drag and Drop between the Guest OS and the native one!!!!!!
(Version 3.0.10) | |
| [ 2 Replies - Reply ] | |
Replies:
| Oct 31 2009 |
SCOTTISHWILDCAT Hardly a "huge fail", I've been using VirtualBox for years and never missed this feature.
(Version 3.0.10) | |
| Jan 4 2010 |
BCWINTERS The clipboard is shared between the host and the virtual machine (or at least it is for my setup, with an OS X host and an XP VM). It is also very simple to set up a shared folder to allow you to pass files from the host to the VM. Yeah, it's not drag and drop, but it works very nicely.
(Version 3.1.2) | |
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