Oracle - (Open Source)
VirtualBox is an easy and elegant solution for those who want to control a computer from another computer.
VirtualBox offers virtualize your operating system (OS) guests on a host machine. Called hypervisor, the application supports Windows OS X, Linux, Mac, Solaris, FreeBSD, etc.. as host, Mac OS X missing the call as a guest.
It also includes a remote access via HTTP protocol, convenient for demonstrations on a clean system. The ability to manage multiple states of the system is particularly interesting and its interface is very simple.
Virtualization solutions allow installing an operating system on a virtual machine using the resources of the host PC , thus enjoying very good performance. In the genre, several solutions are known for their ease of use, such as VMware Workstation , Parallels Desktop or Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 SP1.
A virtual machine is a useful way to use two operating systems simultaneously and harmless to the host computer. There is the possibility to install Linux on a virtual machine on Windows and vice versa .
This is a maintenance release. The following items were fixed and/or added:
* AMD-V, VT-x: stability fixes
* Shared Folders: fixed host crash (Solaris host only, bugs #1336, #1646)
* Shared Folders: fixed BSOD when debugging with Visual Studio (bug #1627)
* Shared Folders: fixed BSOD when compiling on a shared folder (bug #1683)
* Shared Folders: several fixes/stability improvements
* SATA: fixed a race that could cause an occasional Windows guest system hang
* SATA: fixed spurious BIOS log messages
* Networking: fixed NIC tracing with NAT interfaces (bug #1790)
* USB: fixed crash under certain conditions when unplugging a USB device (bug #1295)
* Settings: fixed bug when converting 1.5.x settings
* RDP: fixed enabling the RDP server during runtime
* RDP: properly detect the rdesktop 1.6.0 RDP client
* RDP: fixed RDP crash (bug #1521)
* RDP: updated modified rdesktop client to version 1.6.0
* GUI: NLS improvements
* BIOS: added SMBIOS header to make Solaris and Vista recognize the DMI data
* ACPI: properly hide a disabled floppy controller
* VMM: small fixes to protected mode without paging
* VMDK: fixed handling of .vmdk images without UUIDs
* Windows hosts: fixed driver parameter validation issue in VBoxDrv.sys that could allow an attacker on the host to crash the system
* Windows hosts: installer now contains web service examples mentioned in the manual
* Linux hosts: properly deregister the Linux kernel module before uninstalling a Linux deb/rpm package
* Linux hosts: kernel module works now with Linux 2.6.27
* Linux hosts: fixed a typo in the vboxnet setup script for host network interfaces (bug #1714)
* Linux hosts: fixed usage of tar in installer (bug #1767)
* Linux hosts: fixed long guest shutdown time when serial port is enabled
* Solaris hosts: refuse to install in Sun xVM hypervisor dom0
* Solaris hosts: accept Solaris raw disks when for raw disk access
* Windows additions: made installation of shared folders more robust
* Windows additions: improved installation
* Linux additions: accept every user-defined guest video mode in /etc/X11/xorg.conf
* Linux additions: fixed startup order for recent Linux distributions (e.g. openSUSE 11)