The latest version of VirtualBox can be downloaded from Softpedia

Sep 10, 2014 11:49 GMT  ·  By

A new version of VirtualBox, a virtualization product for enterprises and end users, has been announced by Oracle, bringing a number of fixes and small improvements.

VirtualBox is one of the most used virtualization tools on the Linux platform, although it has quite a competition. It's probably the most friendly software of its kind, so it's no wonder that most users immediately install any updates, no matter how small.

The 4.3 branch of VirtualBox is considered to be the most advanced and this is the one you need to test some of the latest operating systems. It's also the one with the most features, so unless there is a conflict between the new software you are testing and an old distribution, there is no reason to get anything else.

A maintenance release with quite a few fixes

Like all the versions in this branch that came before this one, the current 4.3.16 update is considered to be maintenance only. This means that you shouldn't expect big changes or new features, just a bunch of fixes. It's possible that some of those fixes will affect you directly, so it's a good idea to update as soon as possible.

According to the changelog, restoring 32-bit FPU state on 64-bit capable VMs and restoring guest FPU in raw-mode VMs now works properly, the normal/scale mode guest-screen has been restored to its proper size, the mini-toolbar will have less conflicts with 3D guest rendering, modern window managers now use native full-screen multi-screen mapping API, and an extradata item for configuring the mouse capture behavior has been added.

Also, a VBoxSVC crash that occurred when querying an iSCSI target with the authentication configured has been patched, a rare crash that occurred for certain VHD images from other products has been fixed, video recording support for 3D data has been implemented properly, a number of fixes for MS Office 2013 support have been added, a crash in gnome-session has been fixed, support for X.Org Server 1.16 has been added, and numerous other fixes have been implemented.

Where to get the new release

The developers of VirtualBox have several branches that are being developed at the same time and all of them are stable. In fact, users will find that they can choose between the following versions: 4.3.14, 4.2.26, 4.1.34, 4.0.26, and 3.2.24.

The VirtualBox solution is capable of running a large number of OSes, including Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, and Solaris hosts, not to mention a lot of other guest additions.

The VirtualBox 4.3 branch of the software can be considered a very stable one, especially after the large number of updates that have been issued until now for the application.

More details about this release can be found in the official announcement. You can also check our review of VirtualBox and you can also download VirtualBox 4.3.16 from Softpedia.