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Oracle has released a new version of VirtualBox



VirtualBox is a powerful x86 and AMD64/Intel64 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) version 2. See "About VirtualBox" for an introduction.

Presently, VirtualBox runs on Windows, Linux, Macintosh, and 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), DOS/Windows 3.x, Linux (2.4 and 2.6), Solaris and OpenSolaris, OS/2, 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 Oracle ensures the product always meets professional quality criteria.

What's new in VirtualBox 4.2.8:

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

VMM: fixed guest crash with huge amount of guest RAM on VT-x hosts (bug #11306)
GUI: fixed a layout bug in the Mac OS X clone VM dialog (bug #10982)
GUI: not all the translation tags were taken into account during the language switch (bug #11342)
GUI: take guest screenshot dialog sometimes had no keyboard input available on Windows host
Main/Machine: fix generation of spurious event for inaccessible VMs which triggered an endless event generation loop in cooperation with the GUI which became unresponsive (4.2.6 regression, bug #11323)
Main/Display: fix for an access violation under certain conditions in multi-monitor configurations (bug #10539)
Main/Metrics: network metrics are now collected for active (up) interfaces only, the state of an interface being evaluated when the associated metric is enabled via setupMetrics
Snapshots: reduce the time for merging snapshots under certain conditions
Storage: fixed data corruption after resizing a VDI image under certain circumstances (bug #11344)
Storage: fixed non working online merging of snapshots (4.2.6 regression, bug #11359)
Storage: fixed crash when connecting to certain QNAP iSCSI targets
Storage: fixed incompatibility of VHD differencing images with Hyper-V (bug #5990)
Bridged Networking: fixed TCP pseudo header checksum computation for IPv6 (bug #9380)
3D support: fix Battlefield 1942 game crashes (bug #11369)
Settings: really sanitize the name of VM folders and settings file, the code was disabled before (bug #10549)
Settings: allow to change VRDE settings for saved VMs
VBoxManage: don't crash during screenshotpng if there is no display (bug #11363)
Linux hosts: work around gcc bug 55940 which might lead to wrong kernel module code if gcc 4.7 is used to compile the 32-bit Linux host kernel (bug #11035)
Linux hosts: fixed inconsistent lock state and deadlock warnings on module load and VM startup when CONFIG_PROVE_LOCKING is enabled (bug #11318)
Linux hosts: made "]" key work again on Japanese keyboards
Mac OS X hosts: don't crash the kernel during dtrace if the VBox kernel extensions are loaded (10.6 hosts only; bug #11273)
Solaris / Mac OS X hosts: machine CPU load metrics now report 100% when all cores are fully utilized (used to be a single core)
Solaris 11 host installer: wait for any services left over from a previous installation to be terminated to avoid confusing SMF.
Guest Additions: don't block signals for processes executed via guest control
Guest Additions: fixed a small memory leak in VBoxService (bug #10970)
Windows Additions: fixed shared folder issue with large reads/writes on 64 bit Windows guests (bug #11115)
Linux Additions: added auto-logon support for Linux guests using LightDM as the display manager
Linux Additions: Linux 3.8 compile fixes (bug #11036)
X11 Additions: fixed blocked SIGALRM in 3D desktop sessions (bug #10987)
X11 Additions: fixed an unresolved reference in vboxvideo_drv for X.org 6.8 guests and before (e.g. RHEL4; 4.2.0 regression)
X11 Additions: fixed screen automatic resizing for guests with X.org 1.3 or older (4.2.0 regression)

  VirtualBox 4.2.8 released