Virtual Box is a powerful x86 virtualization product 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). See "About Virtual Box" for an introduction.
Presently, Virtual Box runs on Windows, Linux, Macintosh and Open Solaris hosts and supports a large number of guest operating systems including but not limited to Windows (NT 4.0, 2000, XP, Server 2003, Vista, Windows 7,Windows 8), DOS/Windows 3.x, Linux (2.4 and 2.6), Solaris and Open Solaris, 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 Sun ensures the product always meets professional quality criteria.
Some of the features of VirtualBox are:
• Modularity. VirtualBox has an extremely modular design with well-defined internal programming interfaces and a client/server design. This makes it easy to control it from several interfaces at once: for example, you can start a virtual machine in a typical virtual machine GUI and then control that machine from the command line, or possibly remotely. VirtualBox also comes with a full Software Development Kit: even though it is Open Source Software, you don't have to hack the source to write a new interface for VirtualBox.
• Virtual machine descriptions in XML. The configuration settings of virtual machines are stored entirely in XML and are independent of the local machines. Virtual machine definitions can therefore easily be ported to other computers.
• Guest Additions for Windows and Linux. VirtualBox has special software that can be installed inside Windows and Linux virtual machines to improve performance and make integration much more seamless. Among the features provided by these Guest Additions are mouse pointer integration and arbitrary screen solutions (e.g. by resizing the guest window).
• Shared folders. Like many other virtualization solutions, for easy data exchange between hosts and guests, VirtualBox allows for declaring certain host directories as "shared folders", which can then be accessed from within virtual machines.
VirtualBox 4.2.2 (released 2012-10-18)
This is a maintenance release. The following items were fixed and/or added:
VMM: adapted to changes in Mac OS X 10.8.2 (bug #10965)
GUI: restored VM item tool-tip functionality (4.2 regression)
GUI: added group item tool-tip functionality
GUI: fixed handling of the .ova/.ovf file name association (4.2 regression)
GUI: it was not possible to change any setting before the first VM was created (bug #10928)
GUI: disable grouping action if all the selected items are full children list of the same group already
GUI: added menu for runtime drag-and-drop option change
GUI: cleanup shared-clipboard menu on visual-mode change
GUI: make sure VM receives keyboard focus on entering fullscreen-mode on Win host (bug #11051)
GUI: disable proxy authentication for security reasons
3D Support: DrawIndexedPrimitiveUP implementation fixes for the Windows WDDM video driver (bug #10929)
Storage: fixed a release assertion in the AHCI emulation when requests where canceled with asynchronous I/O disabled
Storage: fixed a hang during VM reset under certain circumstances (bug #10898)
NAT: fixed a crash under rare circumstances (Windows hosts only; bug #10128)
NAT: automatically use the host resolver if the host name server is set to some unusual loopback value (bug #10864)
E1000: fixed a VirtualBox crash during intensive network transfers (4.2 regression; bugs #10936, #10969, #10980)
ICH9: fixed PCI bridge initialization
USB mouse: ensure that the last mouse event doesn't get lost if no URBs are available
BIOS: certain legacy guests (e.g. Windows 95) didn't find the boot device after a warm reboot
BIOS: don't trash the palette in text modes when setting the border color
EFI: fixed OS X guest autoboot (4.2 regression)
VBoxManage: fixed output of showvminfo --machinereadable (bug #10973)
VBoxManage: fixed parsing of storageattach --discard (bug #11023)
VBoxManage: fixed wrong output of the HPET setting in showvminfo (bug #11065)
VBoxManage: fixed closing the guest session after executing a guest process via guest control
VBoxShell: adaptions to interface name changes
Guest Additions device: fixed a Guest Additions hang when a machine was reset after a crash
Linux hosts / guests: Linux 3.7-rc1 fixes
Linux Additions: support X.Org Server 1.13
Linux Additions: fixed a hang when the X server was restarted with old guest kernels
Linux Additions: fixed a VBoxService crash during CPU hot remove (bug #10964)
Windows Additions: fixed automatic screen resize issue for NT4 guests
OS/2 Additions: fixed shutdown hang
OS/2 Additions: fixed mouse driver panic
Solaris hosts: fixed autostart service going into maintenance mode after all VMs started
Solaris hosts: fixed linking the host driver with the dtrace module
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