VirtualBox 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 VirtualBox" for an introduction.
Presently, VirtualBox runs on Windows, Linux, Macintosh and OpenSolaris 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, 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 4.2.4 (released 2012-10-26)
This is a maintenance release. The following items were fixed and/or added:
GUI: fixed validation warning on global settings / proxy page (4.2.2 regression, bug #11089)
GUI: fixed crash with multiple guest screens on certain conditions (OS X hosts only)
VBoxBalloonCtrl: fixed command line argument handling of ballooning module
VRDP: fixed occasional crash during a video playback in the guest (bug #11082)
BIOS: fixed broken DMI information (4.2 regression)
BIOS: workaround for booting from Windows 2000 floppy disks
EFI: fixed video mode selection loss on VM reboot (#10983)
Parallel: fixed parallel port printing failure/ paper queue empty error (Windows hosts only; bug #2226)
NAT: fixed crash on alias-less DNS responses when host-resolver is used
Storage: fixed hang under rare circumstances
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