The final version of VirtualBox is really close

Jul 4, 2015 10:56 GMT  ·  By

VirtualBox, a virtualization application that allows users to run and install operating systems inside other OSes, has received a fresh RC for the new 5.0 branch.

VirtualBox 5.0 promises to be a very important update for the application, and it looks like Oracle has put a lot of effort into it. This application is one of the best of its kind, and it's an invaluable tool on Linux. It works with pretty much any distribution that you can think of, and developers have been careful to keep everything up to date, including support for the latest kernels.

We've already had a couple of Release Candidates, and each of them has brought a ton of changes and new improvements. This third one is not as big as the other two, and that might mean that the developers are getting really close to release the stable edition.

Final VirtualBox 5.0 is just around the corner

According to the changelog, a problem with large pages in Hyper-V has been fixed, a hang under certain conditions for SMP guests has been corrected, a crash during shutdown under rare conditions has been fixed, loading a saved state if 2D Video Acceleration is enabled now works properly, user interface settings are now applied from the corresponding page only after pressing OK, various fixes for KDE-based guests have been implemented, transferring plain text to Windows guests has been added, and transferring large files from host to Linux/Unix guests has been fixed as well.

This is not the kind of release that you would normally find in repositories, with some exceptions, so you will probably have to install it manually. The good news is that VirtualBox is available in numerous formats, so that should not be a problem.

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 5.0 RC3 from Softpedia. Please keep in mind that it's not a stable release and it shouldn't be used on production machines.