VirtualBox application 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 Public License (GPL). See "About VirtualBox" for an introduction; see "InnoTek" for more about our company.

Presently, VirtualBox runs on Windows and Linux 32-bit 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.

Requirements:

· You will need to install some additional libraries on your Linux system in order to run VirtualBox - in particular, you will need libxalan-c, libxerces-c and version 5 of libstdc . How to install these will depend on the Linux distribution you are using.

What's New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]

The following major new features were added:

· Teleportation (aka live migration); migrate a live VM session from one machine to another
· VM states can now be restored from arbitrary snapshots instead of only the last one, and new snapshots can be taken from other snapshots as well (aka branched snapshots)
· 2D video acceleration for Windows guests; use the host video hardware for overlay stretching and colour conversion
· The network attachment type can be changed while a VM is running
· Experimental USB support for OpenSolaris hosts making use of the latest USB enhancements in Solaris Nevada 124 and higher.
· Significant performance improvements for PAE and AMD64 guests (VT-x and AMD-V only; normal (non-nested) paging)
· Experimental support for EFI (Extended Firmware Interface)
· VirtIO network device support

In addition, the following items were fixed and/or added:

· VMM: reduced IO-APIC overhead for 32 bits Windows NT/2000/XP/2003 guests; requires 64 bits support (VT-x only; bug #4392)
· VMM: fixed double timer interrupt delivery on old Linux kernels using IO-APIC (caused guest time to run at double speed; bug #3135)
· VMM: reinit VT-x and AMD-V after host suspend or hibernate; some BIOSes forget this (Windows hosts only; bug #5421)
· GUI: prevent starting a VM with a single mouse click (bug #2676)
· 3D support: major performance improvement in VBO processing
· 3D support: added GL_EXT_framebuffer_object, GL_EXT_compiled_vertex_array support
· 3D support: fix crashes in FarCry, SecondLife, Call of Duty, Unreal Tournament, Eve Online (bugs #2801, #2791)
· 3D support: fix graphics corruption in World of Warcraft (#2816)
· iSCSI: support iSCSI targets with more than 2TiB capacity
· VRDP: fixed occasional VRDP server crash (bug #5424)
· Network: fixed the E1000 emulation for QNX (and probably other) guests (bug #3206)
· Network: even if the virtual network cable was disconnected, some guests were able to send / receive packets (E1000; bug #5366)
· Network: even if the virtual network cable was disconnected, the PCNet card received some spurious packets which might confuse the guest (bug #4496)
· VMDK: fixed handling of split image variants
· VHD: fixed incompatibility with Hyper-V
· OVF: create manifest files on export and verify the content of an optional manifest file on import
· X11 based hosts: allow the user to specify their own scan code layout (bug #2302)
· Mac OS X hosts: don't auto show the menu and dock in fullscreen (#bug 4866)
· Solaris hosts: combined the kernel interface package into the VirtualBox main package
· Solaris hosts: support for OpenSolaris Boomer architecture (with OSS audio backend).
· Shared folders: fixed changing case of file names (bug #2520)
· Shared folders: VBOXSVR is visible in Network folder (bug #4842)
· Windows and Linux Additions: added balloon tip notifier if VirtualBox host version was updated and Additions are out of date
· Solaris Additions: fixed as_pagelock() failed errors affecting guest properties (bug #5337)
· Windows Additions: added automatic logon support for Windows Vista and Windows 7
· Windows Additions: fix crash in seamless mode (contributed by Huihong Luo)
· Linux Additions: added support for uninstalling the Linux Guest Additions (bug #4039)
· SDK: added object-oriented web service bindings for PHP5