VirtualBox 4.2 is out and ready to Download Now. I like the sound of the Improvements and Bug fixes. And I was going to Download VirtualBox 4.2 and Update my aging, VirtualBox 4.0.2 in my Fedora 14 Linux System. Because, there are more and more Linux Distro ISO's that wont run in my version of VirtualBox...

But, alas, 4.2 is only available for Fedora 16-17. I really need to get to installing Fedora 17 on one of my Hard Drives. It's just that I love my Fedora 14 Setup, with Gnome 2 and all of the Apps that I have installed. Anyway... If you want to try out VirtualBox 4.2. Here's some info on the Updates and what you will be getting into...

Don

Oracle VM 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.

Read More...
https://www.virtualbox.org/

Download VirtualBox

Here, you will find links to VirtualBox binaries and its source code.

Go there...
https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads

VirtualBox 4.2 for Linux

Go there...
https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Linux_Downloads

Guest Additions for Linux

Like the Windows Guest Additions, the VirtualBox Guest Additions for Linux are a set of device drivers and system applications which may be installed in the guest operating system.

The following Linux distributions are officially supported:

    Fedora as of Fedora Core 4;

    Redhat Enterprise Linux as of version 3;

    SUSE and openSUSE Linux as of version 9;

    Ubuntu as of version 5.10.

Many other distributions are known to work with the Guest Additions.

Oracle VM VirtualBox

The latest release is version 4.2.0.

On this page you can download:

Oracle VM VirtualBox

Freely available for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and Solaris x-86 platforms:

Go there...
www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/virtualbox/downloads/index.html

Changelog for VirtualBox 4.2

This page lists all changes of the VirtualBox 4.2 releases.
All branches: 4.2 · 4.1 · 4.0 · 3.2 · 3.1 · 3.0 · 2.2 · 2.1 · 2.0 · 1.6

VirtualBox 4.2.0 (released 2012-09-13)

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

Improved Windows 8 support, in particular many 3D-related fixes
GUI: VM groups (bug #288)
GUI: expert mode for wizards
GUI: allow to alter some settings during runtime
Support for up to 36 network cards, in combination with an ICH9 chipset configuration (bug #8805)
Resource control: added support for limiting network IO bandwidth; see the manual for more information (bug #3653)
Added possibility to start VMs during system boot on Linux, OS X and Solaris; see the manual for more information (bug #950)
Added experimental support for Drag'n'drop from the host to Linux guests. Support for more guests and for guest-to-host is planned. (bug #81)
Added support for parallel port passthrough on Windows hosts
Enhanced API for controlling the guest; please see the SDK reference and API documentation for more information

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

Mac OS X hosts: sign application and installer to avoid warnings on Mountain Lion
VMM: fixed a potential host crash triggered by shutting down a VM when another VM was running (only affected 32-bit hosts and 64-bit OS X hosts, 4.1 regression, bug #9897)
VMM: fixed a potential host crash under a high guest memory pressure (seen with Windows 8 guests)
VMM: improved VM context switch performance for Intel CPUs using nested paging
VMM: added support for FlushByASID features of AMD CPUs (Bulldozer and newer)
VMM: fixed unreal mode handling on older CPUs with VT-x (gPXE, Solaris 7/8/9; bug #9941)
VMM: fixed MP tables fixes for I/O APIC interrupt routing relevant for ancient SMP guests (e.g. old OS/2 releases)
VMM: support recent VIA CPUs (bug #10005)
VMM: fixed handling of task gates if VT-x/AMD-V is disabled
VMM: page fusion fixes
GUI: network operations manager
GUI: allow taking screenshots of the current VM window content (bug #5561)
GUI: allow automatically sorting of the VM list
GUI: allow starting of headless VMs from the GUI
GUI: allow reset, shutdown and power off from the Manager window
GUI: allow to globally limit the maximum screen resolution for guests
GUI: show the full medium part on hovering the list of recently used ISO images
GUI: do not create additional folders when a new machine has a separator character in its name (bug #6541)
GUI: don't crash on terminate if the settings dialog is still open (bug #9973)
GUI: consider scaled DPI values when display fonts on Windows hosts (bug #9864)
GUI: if a bridged network interface cannot be found, don't refuse to start the VM but allow the user to change the setting immediately
Snapshots: fixed a crash when restoring an old snapshot when powering off a VM (bugs #9364, #9604, #10491)
Clipboard: disable the clipboard by default for new VMs (see the manual for more information). It can be enabled at any time using the VM menu.
Settings: sanitize the name of VM folders and settings file (bug #10549)
Settings: allow to store the iSCSI initiator secret encrypted
NAT: improvements for the built-in TFTP server (bugs #7385, #10286)
NAT: fixed memory leak when disabling the NAT engine (bug #10801)
E1000: 802.1q VLAN support (bug #10429)
Storage: implemented burning of audio CDs in passthrough mode
Storage: fixed audio CD passthrough for certain media players
Storage: implemented support for discarding unused image blocks through TRIM for SATA and IDE and UNMAP for SCSI when using VDI images
Storage: added support for QED images
Storage: added support for QCOW (full support for v1 and readonly support for v2 images)
Storage: added readonly support for VHDX images
USB: don't crash if a USB device is plugged or unplugged when saving or loading the VM state (SMP guests only)
Solaris additions: added support for X.org Server 1.11 and 1.12
Solaris additions: switched to using an in-kernel mouse driver
Windows hosts: no need to recreate host-only adapters after a VirtualBox update
Windows hosts: updated toolchain; make the source code compatible to VC 2010 and enable some security-related compiler options
Windows Additions: fixed memory leak in VBoxTray (bug #10808)

Go there...
https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Changelog

VirtualBox 4.2 info from the Oracle VM VirtualBox User Manual

9.23 Other extension packs
Starting with VirtualBox 4.2.0 there is another extension pack, VNC, which is open source and
replaces the previous integration of the VNC remote access protocol. This is experimental code,
and will be initially available in the VirtualBox source code package only. It is to a large portion
code contributed by users, and is not supported in any way by Oracle.
The keyboard handling is severely limited, and only the US keyboard layout works. Other
keyboard layouts will have at least some keys which produce the wrong results (often quite
surprising effects), and for layouts which have signiﬁcant differences to the US keyboard layout
it is most likely unusable.
It is possible to install both the Oracle VM VirtualBox Extension Pack and VNC, but only one
VRDE module can be active at any time. The following command switches to the VNC VRDE
module in VNC:

Skipping to next VirtualBox 4.2.0 mention...

9.24 Starting virtual machines during system boot
Starting with VirtualBox 4.2.0 it is possible to start VMs automatically during system boot on
Linux, Solaris and Mac OS X for all users.

Skipping to next VirtualBox 4.2.0 mention...

14.2 Known Issues
The following section describes known problems with VirtualBox 4.2.0. Unless marked other-
wise, these issues are planned to be ﬁxed in later releases.
• The following Guest SMP (multiprocessor) limitations exist:
– Poor performance with 32-bit guests on AMD CPUs. This affects mainly Windows
and Solaris guests, but possibly also some Linux kernel revisions. Partially solved in
3.0.6 for 32 bits Windows NT, 2000, XP and 2003 guests. Requires 3.0.6 or higher
Guest Additions to be installed.
– Poor performance with 32-bit guests on certain Intel CPU models that do not include
virtual APIC hardware optimization support. This affects mainly Windows and Solaris
guests, but possibly also some Linux kernel revisions. Partially solved in 3.0.12 for
32 bits Windows NT, 2000, XP and 2003 guests. Requires 3.0.12 or higher Guest
Additions to be installed.
• 64-bit guests on some 32-bit host systems with VT-x can cause instabilities to your
system. If you experience this, do not attempt to execute 64-bit guests. Refer to the
VirtualBox user forum for additional information.
208
14 Known limitations
• For basic Direct3D support in Windows guests to work, the Guest Additions must be
installed in Windows “safe mode”. Press F8 when the Windows guest is booting and select
“Safe mode”, then install the Guest Additions. Otherwise Windows’ ﬁle protection mech-
anism will interfere with the replacement DLLs installed by VirtualBox and keep restoring
the original Windows system DLLs.
Note: This does not apply to the experimental WDDM Direct3D video driver available
for Vista and Windows 7 guests shipped with VirtualBox 4.1.
• Guest control. On Windows guests, a process lauched via the guest control execute support
will not be able to display a graphical user interface unless the user account under which it
is running is currently logged in and has a desktop session.
Also, to use accounts without or with an empty password, the guest’s group policy must
be changed. To do so, open the group policy editor on the command line by typ-
ing gpedit.msc, open the key Computer Conﬁguration\Windows Settings\Security Set-
tings\Local Policies\Security Options and change the value of Accounts: Limit local account
use of blank passwords to console logon only to Disabled.
• Compacting virtual disk images is limited to VDI ﬁles. The VBoxManage modifyhd
--compact command is currently only implemented for VDI ﬁles. At the moment the only
way to optimize the size of a virtual disk images in other formats (VMDK, VHD) is to clone
the image and then use the cloned image in the VM conﬁguration.
• OVF import/export:
– OVF localization (multiple languages in one OVF ﬁle) is not yet supported.
– Some OVF sections like StartupSection, DeploymentOptionSection and InstallSection
are ignored.
– OVF environment documents, including their property sections and appliance conﬁg-
uration with ISO images, are not yet supported.
– Remote ﬁles via HTTP or other mechanisms are not yet supported.
• Neither scale mode nor seamless mode work correctly with guests using OpenGL 3D
features (such as with compiz-enabled window managers).
• The RDP server in the VirtualBox extension pack supports only audio streams in format
22.05kHz stereo 16 bit. If the RDP client requests any other audio format there will be no
audio.
• Preserving the aspect ratio in scale mode works only on Windows hosts and on Mac OS X
hosts.
• On Mac OS X hosts, the following features are not yet implemented:
– Numlock emulation
– CPU frequency metric
– Memory ballooning
• Mac OS X guests:
– Mac OS X guests can only run on a certain host hardware. For details about license
and host hardware limitations, please see chapter 3.1.1, Mac OS X guests, page 43 and
check the Apple software license conditions.
– VirtualBox does not provide Guest Additions for Mac OS X at this time.
209
14 Known limitations
– The graphics resolution currently defaults to 1024x768 as Mac OS X falls back to the
built-in EFI display support. See chapter 3.12.1, Video modes in EFI, page 55 for more
information on how to change EFI video modes.
– Even when idle, Mac OS X guests currently burn 100% CPU. This is a power manage-
ment issue that will be addressed in a future release.
– Mac OS X guests only work with one CPU assigned to the VM. Support for SMP will
be provided in a future release.
– Depending on your system and version of Mac OS X, you might experience guest
hangs after some time. This can be ﬁxed by turning off energy saving (set timeout to
“Never”) in the system preferences.
– By default, the VirtualBox EFI enables debug output of the Mac OS X kernel to help
you diagnose boot problems. Note that there is a lot of output and not all errors are
fatal (they would also show on your physical Mac). You can turn off these messages
by issuing this command:
VBoxManage setextradata "VM name" "VBoxInternal2/EfiBootArgs" "
"
To revert to the previous behavior, use:
VBoxManage setextradata "VM name" "VBoxInternal2/EfiBootArgs" ""
• Solaris hosts:
– There is no support for USB devices connected to Solaris 10 hosts.
– USB support on Solaris hosts requires Solaris 11 version snv_124 or higher. Webcams
and other isochronous devices are known to have poor performance.
– No ACPI information (battery status, power source) is reported to the guest.
– No support for using wireless adapters with bridged networking.
– Crossbow-based bridged networking on Solaris 11 hosts does not work directly with
aggregate links. However, you can manually create a VNIC (using dladm) over the
aggregate link and use that with a VM. This technical limitation will be addressed in
a future Solaris 11 release.
• Guest Additions of version 4.1, 4.1.2 and 4.1.4 for Windows Thus VirtualBox WDDM
Video driver may be installed and kept in guest system if Guest additions uninstallation is
performed. This is caused by a bug in Guest Additions uninstaller.
Note: This does not apply to Guest Additions update, i.e. installing a one version of
Guest Additions on top of another works correctly.
To solve this problem, one should uninstall the VirtualBox WDDM Video driver manu-
ally. To do that open Device Manager, and check whether the Display Adapter is named
“VirtualBox Graphics Adapter ..“. If no - there is nothing to be done. If yes - right-clik the
VirtualBox Graphics Adapter in Device Manager, select “Uninstall”, check “Delete the driver
software for this device” and click “OK”. Once uninstallation is done - in Device Manager go
to menu “Action” and select “Scan for hardware changes” to make the propper (Windows
default) driver be picked up for the Graphics adapter.
• Neither virtio nor Intel PRO/1000 drivers for Windows XP guests do not support segmen-
tation ofﬂoading. Therefore Windows XP guests have slower transmission rates comparing
to other guest types. Refer to MS Knowledge base article 842264 for additional informa-
tion.
• Guest Additions for OS/2. Shared folders are not yet supported with OS/2 guests. In ad-
dition, seamless windows and automatic guest resizing will probably never be implemented
due to inherent limitations of the OS/2 graphics system.