14 DAY TRIAL // The free, open source virtualization solution from Oracle, VirtualBox has added support for Apple’s upcoming major revision of the Mac OS, Lion.
VirtualBox is a good alternative to pricey virtualization solutions like VMware Fusion and Parallels.
It can hold various guest operating systems ranging from Windows, and Linux to Solaris and Open BSD.
VirtualBox 4.0.10 is now here with the usual bag of fixes and enhancements, starting with a GUI tweak, which fixes disappearing settings widgets on KDE hosts, then moving onto Storage.
In this particular area, Oracle mentions the following changes:
- fixed hang under rare circumstances with flat VMDK images - a saved VM could not be restored under certain circumstances after the host kernel was updated - refuse to create a medium with an invalid variant
For Snapshots, the developers say that “none of the hard disk attachments must be attached to another VM in normal mode when creating a snapshot.”
A couple of USB fixes are mentioned, one of which allows for proper device detection on RHEL/OEL/CentOS 5 guests. This, however, is labeled as a partial fix.
Two Mac-specific changes are mentioned.
For those using a Mac as the host of VirtualBox, Oracle is proud to confirm that the new version further strengthens compatibility with OS X 10.7 Lion simply by fixing a bunch of known bugs.
The other fix available for Mac OS X hosts is related to GNOME 3, according to those maintaining the software. The remainder of the changelog continues below:
· ACPI: force the ACPI timer to return monotonic values for improve behavior with SMP Linux guests · RDP: fixed screen corruption under rare circumstances · rdesktop-vrdp: updated to version 1.7.0 · OVF: under rare circumstances some data at the end of a VMDK file was not written during export
VirtualBox calls for an Intel-based Mac, over 2GB of RAM (if you want a decent experience), around 100MB of storage for the program itself, and additional storage (by the gigabyte) for the operating systems you plan to install.