VirtualBox 4.0.8 released 5-16-2011

This is a maintenance release: http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads

The following items were fixed and/or added:

• Mac OS X hosts: fixed incompatibility with recent Mac OS X versions in 64-bit mode (bug #8474)
• Mac OS X hosts: fixed incompatibility with hosts with more than 16 cores (bug #8389)
• Mac OS X hosts: fixed painting corruptions on a second monitor in 64-bit mode (bug #7606)
• GUI: restored functionality to set an empty host key to disallow any host key combination (4.0.6 regression; bug #8793)
• VBoxManage: added controlvm screenshotpng subcommand for saving the screenshot of a running VM in PNG format
• VBoxHeadless: fixed potential crash during shutdown (Windows hosts only)
• NAT: built-in services use the correct Ethernet addresses in Ethernet header and in ARP requests
• Host-only networking: fixed adapter reference counting
• E1000: fixed rare guest crashes with Linux SMP guests (bug #8755)
• SATA: fixed guest disk corruption under rare circumstances (only relevant for guests with more than 2GB RAM; bug #8826)
• Storage: fixed data corruption after a snapshot was taken with asynchronous I/O enabled (bug #8498)
• Floppy: several improvement
• HPET: another fix for time jumps (bug #8707)
• USB: removed assumption that string descriptors are null-terminated (Windows hosts only)
• 3D support: fixed a potential crash when resizing the guest window
• 3D support: fixed GNOME 3 rendering under Ubuntu 11.04 and Fedora 15
• Snapshots: fixed another bug which could lose entries in the media registry when restoring a snapshot (bug #8363)
• Shared Folders: don’t stop mounting the other valid folders if one host folder is inaccessible (4.0.6 regression)
• Linux Additions: check whether gcc and make are installed before building kernel modules (bug #8795)
• Solaris Additions: added support for X.Org Server 1.10
• Guest Additions: fixed inappropriate Guest Additions update notification when using vendor-specific version suffixes (bug #8844)

Oracle VirtualBox 4.0.6 release

This is a maintenance release:

http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Changelog

This is a maintenance release. The following items were fixed and/or added:

• VMM: fixed incorrect handling of ballooned pages when restoring a VMM from a saved state
• VMM: don’t crash on hosts with more than 64 cores / hyperthreads; implemented support for up to 256 host cores (except Windows hosts; bug #8489)
• VMM: fixed guru meditation for PAE guests running on hosts without PAE (bug #8006)
• VMM: fixed slow Linux guests with raw mode and recent guest kernels (bug #8726)
• GUI: support host key combinations (bug #979)
• GUI: fixed progress indicator (bug #7814)
• GUI: show the mouse pointer while the VM is paused if the USB tablet mouse emulation is used (bug #6799)
• GUI: adapt the snapshot folder as well when renaming a VM (bug #8469)
• GUI: persistently remember the last folders of the disk/DVD/floppy selectors
• GUI: never allow to start a VM with USB-2.0 activated if the proper extension pack is missing (bug #8182)
• GUI: fixed hang/crash when opening a file dialog in an non-existing folder (bug #8673)
• Snapshots: fixed a bug which could lose entries in the media registry when restoring a snapshot (bug #8363)
• Snapshots: allow snapshots to be stored in the VM directory
• 3D support: fixed a crash if a VM was forced to terminate (Windows hosts only; bug #7133)
• Storage: fixed memory leak (4.0 regression; bug #7966)
• Storage: fixed access to iSCSI targets over internal network
• Storage: fixed reading from disks with more than one snapshot for VHD and VMDK images with disabled host cache (bug #8408)
• Storage: fixed a possible hang during VM suspend after an I/O error occurred
• Storage: fixed a possible hang during VM suspend / reset (bug #8276, #8294)
• Storage: automatically create a diff image when attaching a streamOptimized VMDK image to a VM
• ATA/SATA: fixed automounting of virtual CD/DVD mediums with recent Linux distributions by correctly reporting the current profile as ‘none’ if no medium is present
• Buslogic: fixed emulation for certain guests (e.g. jRockit VE)
• Host-Only Networking: fixed interface creation failure on Windows hosts (4.0.4 regression; bug #8362)
• Host-Only & Bridged & Internal Networking: fix for processing promiscuous mode requests by VMs, defaulting to switch behaviour
• Host-Only Networking: fixed connectivity issue after resuming the host from sleep (bug #3625)
• Bridged Networking: support for interface bonding on Mac OS X hosts (bug #8731)
• NAT: fixed processing of ARP announcements for guests with static assigned IPs (bug #8609)
• VRDP: backward compatibility with VRDPAuth external authentication library (bug #8063)
• Shared Folders: don’t fail to start a VM if a path is not absolute, for example when importing an OVF from a different host (bug #7941)
• Audio: fixed crash under certain conditions (bug #8527)
• USB: fixed a crash when plugging certain USB devices (bug #8699)
• HPET: fixed time jumps when reading the counter (bug #8707)
• OVF/OVA: automatically adjust disk paths if the VM name is changed on import
• OVF/OVA: fix export to slow medias
• OVF/OVA: automatically repair inconsistent appliances with multiple disks (bug #8253)
• rdesktop-vrdp: fixed an assertion triggered under certain conditions (bug #8593)
• Windows hosts: fixed occasional hangs during VM shutdown because sometimes COM was not properly uninitialized
• Mac OS X hosts: prevent the mouse from leaving the VM window while captured
• Mac OS X hosts: keep aspect ratio while resizing in scale mode (shift for old behaviour) (part of bug #7822)
• X11 hosts: fixed Yen key support (bug #8438)
• X11 hosts: fixed a regression which caused Host+F1 to pop up help instead of sending Ctrl+Alt+F1
• Linux hosts / Linux Additions: mangle IPRT symbols to allow installing VirtualBox inside a VM while the Guest Additions are active (bug #5686)
• Linux hosts / Linux guests: workaround for a bug in GLIBC older than version 1.11 leading to crashes under certain conditions (signed/unsigned problem with memchr on 64-bit machines)
• Solaris hosts: fixed a deadlock in event semaphores that could lead to unkillable VM processes
• Windows Additions: fixed Sysprep parameter handling
• Windows Additions: fixed spontaneous guest reboots under certain circumstances (4.0.2 regression; bugs #8406, #8429)
• Windows Additions: added auto logon support for locked workstations on legacy Windows versions
• Windows Additions: fixed driver bugcheck error when handling PnP messages (4.0 regression; bug #8367)
• Windows Additions: fixed memory leak in VBoxVideo
• X11 Additions: added support for X.Org Server 1.10 final
• Linux Additions: Linux kernel 2.6.39-rc1 fixes
• Linux Additions: improved auto-run support (bug #5509)
• Linux Additions: fix mouse support on SUSE 11 SP 1 guests (bug #7946)
• Solaris Additions: added support for X.Org Server 1.9
• Guest Additions: various bugfixes for guest control execution
• Webservice: use own log file, with log rotation to limit size

Virtual Box 4.0 Released

Download

From the change log:

VirtualBox 4.0.0 (released 2010-12-22)

This version is a major update. The following major new features were added:

• Reorganization of VirtualBox into a base package and Extension Packs; see chapter 1.5, Installing VirtualBox and extension packs, see the manual for more information
• New settings/disk file layout for VM portability; see chapter 10.1, Where VirtualBox stores its files, see the manual for more information
• Major rework of the GUI (now called “VirtualBox Manager”):
  • Redesigned user interface with guest window preview (also for screenshots)
  • New “scale” display mode with scaled guest display; see chapter 1.8.5, Resizing the machine’s window, see the manual for more information
  • Support for creating and starting .vbox desktop shortcuts (bug #1889)
  • The VM list is now sortable
  • Machines can now be deleted easily without a trace including snapshots and saved states, and optionally including attached disk images (bug #5511; also, VBoxManage unregistervm –delete can do the same now)
  • Built-in creation of desktop file shortcuts to start VMs on double click (bug #2322)
• VMM: support more than 1.5/2 GB guest RAM on 32-bit hosts
• New virtual hardware:
  • Intel ICH9 chipset with three PCI buses, PCI Express and Message Signaled Interrupts (MSI); see chapter 3.4.1, “Motherboard” tab, see the manual for more information
  • Intel HD Audio, for better support of modern guest operating systems (e.g. 64-bit Windows; bug #2785)
• Improvements to OVF support (see chapter 1.12, Importing and exporting virtual machines, see the manual for more information):
  • Open Virtualization Format Archive (OVA) support
  • Significant performance improvements during export and import
  • Creation of the manifest file on export is optional now
  • Imported disks can have formats other than VMDK
• Resource control: added support for limiting a VM’s CPU time and IO bandwidth; see chapter 5.8, Limiting bandwidth for disk images, see the manual for more information
• Storage: support asynchronous I/O for iSCSI, VMDK, VHD and Parallels images
• Storage: support for resizing VDI and VHD images; see chapter 8.21, VBoxManage modifyhd, see the manual for more information.
• Guest Additions: support for multiple virtual screens in Linux and Solaris guests using X.Org server 1.3 and later
• Language bindings: uniform Java bindings for both local (COM/XPCOM) and remote (SOAP) invocation APIs

Installing VirtualBox 3.2 in Debian-based Linux Mint 9

I have struggled with this in the past, since VBox requires some different versions of packages that aren’t easily accessible/installable…at least until I found this hint.

1. Download VBox
2. From a terminal

      sudo dpkg -i "vbox-version".deb
      sudo apt-get -f install

That's it

New Maintenance Releases: VMWare Wks 7.1.1 and Oracle Vbox 3.2.8

Both Oracle and VM Ware have new updates.

Oracle Virtual Box is now 3.2.8

This is a maintenance release. The following items were fixed and/or added:

• 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 (see here for a short explanation)
• 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)

VM Ware Workstation 7.1.1, Release Notes

still need the reboots

VirtualBox 3.2.2 released

Its a maintenance release, the big changes were in 3.2.0

http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Changelog

Note: at post time, the download isn’t available, its still listing 3.2.0 on the download page.

VirtualBox 3.2.0 Beta 1 released, err Oracle VM Virtualbox

What a name! Oracle VM VirtualBox?

Major version update!!!

VirtualBox Version 3.2.0 is a major update. The following major new features were added:

• Following the acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle Corporation, the product is now called Oracle VM VirtualBox and all references were changed without impacting compatibility.
• Experimental support for Mac OS X guests
• Memory ballooning to dynamically in- or decrease the amount of RAM used by a VM (64-bit hosts only) (see the manual for more information)
• CPU hot-plugging for Linux (hot-add and hot-remove) and certain Windows guests (hot-add only) (see the manual for more information)
• New Hypervisor features: with both VT-x/AMD-V on 64-bit hosts, using large pages can improve performance (see the manual for more information); also, on VT-x, unrestricted guest execution is now supported (if nested paging is enabled with VT-x, real mode and protected mode without paging code runs faster, which mainly speeds up guest OS booting)
• Support for deleting snapshots while the VM is running
• Support for multi-monitor guest setups in the GUI (see the manual for more information)
• USB tablet/keyboard emulation for improved user experience if no Guest Additions are available
• LsiLogic SAS controller emulation
• RDP video acceleration
• NAT engine configuration via API and VBoxManage
• Guest Additions: added support for executing guest applications from the host system
• OVF: enhanced OVF support with custom namespace to preserve settings that are not part of the base OVF standard

VirtualBox 3.16 released 3/25

Missed it again! Good excuse this time, moving to a new house. This is another maintenance release, lots of bug fixes.
changelog