VirtualBox 4.2.12 Build 84980

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VirtualBox is a general-purpose full virtualizer for hardware. Targeted at server, desktop and embedded use, it is now the only professional quality virtualization solution that is also Open Source Software. VirtualBox is a powerful virtualization product for enterprise as well as home use. VirtualBox provides are useful for several scenarios: Running multiple operating systems simultaneously. VirtualBox allows you to run more than one operating system at a time. This way, you can run software written for one operating system on another (for example, Windows software on Linux or a Mac) without having to reboot to use it. Since you can configure what kinds of “virtual” hardware should be presented to each such operating system, you can install an old operating system such as DOS or OS/2 even if your real computer’s hardware is no longer supported by that operating system.

Software vendors can use virtual machines to ship entire software configurations. For example, installing a complete mail server solution on a real machine can be a tedious task. With VirtualBox, such a complex setup (then often called an “appliance”) can be packed into a virtual machine. Installing and running a mail server becomes as easy as importing such an appliance into VirtualBox.

Testing and disaster recovery. Once installed, a virtual machine and its virtual hard disks can be considered a “container” that can be arbitrarily frozen, woken up, copied, backed up, and transported between hosts. On top of that, with the use of another VirtualBox feature called “snapshots”, one can save a particular state of a virtual machine and revert back to that state, if necessary. This way, one can freely experiment with a computing environment. If something goes wrong (e.g. after installing misbehaving software or infecting the guest with a virus), one can easily switch back to a previous snapshot and avoid the need of frequent backups and restores. Any number of snapshots can be created, allowing you to travel back and forward in virtual machine time. You can delete snapshots while a VM is running to reclaim disk space.

Infrastructure consolidation. Virtualization can significantly reduce hardware and electricity costs. Most of the time, computers today only use a fraction of their potential power and run with low average system loads. A lot of hardware resources as well as electricity is thereby wasted. So, instead of running many such physical computers that are only partially used, one can pack many virtual machines onto a few powerful hosts and balance the loads between them.

Supported OS: Windows XP, Server 2003, Server 2008, Windows 7, Server 2012, Windows 8 (32-bit and 64-bit).
Mac OS X hosts: 10.6 (Snow Leopard, 32-bit and 64-bit), 10.7 (Lion, 32-bit and 64-bit), 10.8 (Mountain Lion, 64-bit).
Linux hosts (32-bit and 64-bit): Ubuntu 8.04 (“Hardy Heron”), 8.10 (“Intrepid Ibex”), 9.04 (“Jaunty Jackalope”), 9.10 (“Karmic Koala”), 10.04 (“Lucid Lynx”), 10.10 (“Maverick Meerkat), 11.04 (“Natty Narwhal”), 11.10 (“Oneiric Oncelot”), 12.04 (“Precise Pangolin”), Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 (“lenny”) and 6.0 (“squeeze”), Oracle Enterprise Linux 4 and 5, Oracle Linux 6.

Changes in VirtualBox 4.2.12 (released 2013-04-12):
* VMM: fixed a Guru Meditation on putting Linux guest CPU online if nested paging is disabled
* VMM: invalidate TLB entries even for non-present pages
* GUI: Multi-screen support: fixed a crash on visual-mode change
* GUI: Multi-screen support: disabled guest-screens should now remain disabled on visual-mode change
* GUI: Multi-screen support: handle host/guest screen plugging/unplugging in different visual-modes
* GUI: Multi-screen support: seamless mode: fixed a bug when empty seamless screens were represented by fullscreen windows
* GUI: Multi-screen support: each machine window in multi-screen configuration should have correct menu-bar now (Mac OS X hosts)
* GUI: Multi-screen support: machine window View menu should have correct content in seamless/fullscreen mode now (Mac OS X hosts)
* GUI: VM manager: vertical scroll-bars should be now updated on content/window resize
* GUI: VM settings: fixed crash on machine state-change event
* GUI: don’t show warnings about enabled or disabled mouse integration if the VM was restored from a saved state
* Virtio-net: properly announce that the guest has to handle partial TCP checksums (bug #9380)
* Storage: Fixed incorrect alignment of VDI images causing disk size changes when using snapshots (bug #11597)
* Audio: fixed broken ALSA & PulseAudio on some Linux hosts due to invalid symbol resolution (bug #11615)
* PS/2 keyboard: re-apply keyboard repeat delay and rate after a VM was restored from a saved state (bug #10933)
* BIOS: updated DMI processor information table (type 4): corrected L1 & L2 cache table handles
* Timekeeping: fix several issues which can lead to incorrect time, Solaris guests sporadically showed time going briefly back to Jan 1 1970
* Main/Metrics: disk metrics are collected properly when software RAID, symbolic links or rootfs are used on Linux hosts
* VBoxManage: don’t stay paused after a snapshot was created and the VM was running before
* VBoxManage: introduced controlvm nicpromisc (bug #11423)
* VBoxManage: don’t crash on controlvm guestmemoryballoon if the VM isn’t running (bug #11639)
* VBoxHeadless: don’t filter guest property events as this would affect all clients (bug #11644)
* Guest control: prevent double CR in the output generated by guest commands and do NLS conversion
* Linux hosts / guests: fixed build errors on Linux 3.5 and newer kernels if the CONFIG_UIDGID_STRICT_TYPE_CHECKS config option is enabled (bug #11664)
* Linux Additions: handle fall-back to VESA driver on RedHat-based guests if vboxvideo cannot be loaded
* Linux Additions: RHEL/OEL/CentOS 6.4 compile fix (bug #11586)
* Linux Additions: Debian Linux kernel 3.2.0-4 (3.2.39) compile fix (bug #11634)
* Linux Additions: added auto-logon support for Linux guests using LightDM as the display manager
* Windows Additions: Support for multimonitor. Dynamic enable/disable of secondary virtual monitors. Support for XPDM/WDDM based guests
* X11 Additions: support X.Org Server 1.14 (bug #11609)

Homepage – http://www.virtualbox.org

Size: 94.5 MB

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