VirtualBox 4.1.0 released and ubuntu 11.04/10.10 installation instructions included

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Oracle VM VirtualBox, formerly Sun xVM VirtualBox and innotek VirtualBox, is a family of x86 virtualization products for enterprise and home use.VirtualBox is a general-purpose full virtualizer for x86 hardware, targeted at server, desktop and embedded use.

What is new in virtualbox 4.1.0

This version is a major update. The following major new features were added:

Support for cloning of VMs (bug #5853, see the manual for more information): full clones can be created through the GUI and VBoxManage, linked clones only through VBoxManage
GUI: enhanced wizard for creating new virtual disks
GUI: new wizard for copying virtual disks
GUI: keep the aspect ratio in scale mode (Windows and OSX hosts only; bug #7822)
VMM: raised the memory limit for 64-bit hosts to 1TB
Experimental support for PCI passthrough for Linux hosts, see the manual for more information
Windows guests: Experimental WDDM graphics driver, supporting Windows Aero (bug #4607) and providing Direct3D support using a cleaner approach (no need to install the guest drivers in Safe Mode anymore)
Guest Additions: status of modules and features can now be queried separately by the frontends
Networking: new network attachment mode "Generic Driver", which offers an open plugin architecture for arbitrary and separately distributable virtual network implementations
Host-only Networking: fixed host crash in kernels prior to 2.6.29
New Networking Mode UDP Tunnel: allows to interconnect VMs running on different hosts easily and transparently, see the manual for more information
Experimental support for SATA hard disk hotplugging available with VBoxManage
Solaris hosts: New Crossbow based bridged networking driver for Solaris 11 build 159 and above

In addition, the following items were fixed and/or added:

VMM: more SMP timer fixes
VMM: fixed sporadic recompiler crashes with SMP guests
VMM: many small fixes
GUI: when reverting to a snapshot, ask for taking a snapshot of the current state
GUI: added a View menu
GUI: added a setting for the promiscuous mode policy for internal networks, bridged networks and host-only networks
GUI: added slider for setting the CPU execution cap allowing to limit the amount of CPU time spent for the execution of the guest, see the manual for more information.
GUI: the VM description is editable during the runtime of a VM (bug #1551)
GUI: added proxy settings (bug #2870)
GUI: made the number of SATA ports configurable
GUI: decrease time before showing the VM configuration dialog
VBoxManage: more convenient configuration of storage controller attachments by automatically determining the port or device parameter when a storage controller has only one port or device per port
VBoxManage: changed syntax of the guestcontrol command group, fixed various bugs, removed obsolete options
VBoxBalloonCtrl: new service for automatic dynamic adjustment of the balloon size for running VMs
Settings: machine names and snapshot names are not allowed to be a valid UUID
Settings: provide better diagnostics if a single medium is used twice in a VM configuration
Settings: provide better diagnostics for errors in medium create/merge/clone operations, and fix memory leaks in error cases
Storage: ATA/SATA drives can be marked as non-rotational, i.e. the guest OS will detect them as a SSD if supported, which can improve performance
Storage: virtual CD/DVD images will be detached if the guest ejects the medium, unless the drive is marked to handle ejects only on a temporary basis
Storage: the medium UUID can be changed again when attaching a medium for the first time, which allows using images which are exact duplicates including the UUID
Storage: fixed possible data corruption under certain circumstances with VHD and Parallels images (bug #9150)
Storage: fixed unnecessary expansion when cloning differential images in VDI format
Storage: fixed detection code to handle empty files for VDI and VMDK format
Storage: fixed access to CD/DVD images beyond 4GB when using the SATA controller (bug #8592)
Floppy: several bugs have been fixed
Floppy: make it possible to unmount a host floppy disk (bug #6651)
BIOS: disk-related structures are now checksummed correctly (bug #8739)
USB: many fixes for the Windows USB host driver
NAT: reduced memory footprint
Networking: fixed the problem with segmentation offloading when several VMs are transmitting in parallel
Networking: workaround for a bug in wireshark when operating directly on a capture file created by VirtualBox
Serial: announce the serial devices in the ACPI tables to make Windows guests find the virtual hardware (bug #7411)
VRDP: support for TLS connections (see the manual for more information)
VRDP: support for multimonitor client configurations with MS RDP clients
VRDP: fixed a rare screen corruption
3D support: fixed GL_VERSION string for different locales (bug #8916)
Webservice: fixed timeout handling with HTTP 1.1 keepalive, and be more robust when connections fail
VBoxSVC: fixed regression when several clients trigger autostart simultaneously
Main: fixed incorrect handling of the medium location for media which are not file based (e.g. iSCSI), which resulted in confusing location values in many places
JAX-WS client bindings: fixed resource leak
Sources: fixed USB 2.0 support using extension packs for non-official builds
Mac OS X hosts: fixed non-VT-x mode on Lion hosts
Windows hosts: fixed copy'n'paste in the GUI and for the VM window (bug #4491)
Windows hosts (64-bit only): enabled removing of all mediums when removing a VM
Windows hosts (64-bit only): enabled live snapshot deletion
Windows hosts: use native controls in the installer (bug #5520)
Solaris hosts: fixed preemption issue with Solaris 11 hosts (builds 166 and above)
Solaris hosts: better control of USB device access on Solaris 11 hosts
Guest Additions: improved driver installation on Windows guests
Guest Additions: fixed high CPU usage while executing guest programs from the host
Solaris Additions: fixed automounting of shared folders (bug #8014)

Install virtualbox 4.1.0 on ubuntu 11.04

You need to edit /etc/apt/sources.list

gksudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list

Add the following line

deb http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian natty contrib

For ubuntu 10.10 users add the following line

deb http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian maverick contrib non-free

Save and exit the file

wget -q http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian/oracle_vbox.asc -O- | sudo apt-key add --

Update source list

sudo apt-get update

Install virtualbox

sudo apt-get install virtualbox-4.1

Note: Ubuntu/Debian users might want to install the dkms package to ensure that the VirtualBox host kernel modules (vboxdrv, vboxnetflt and vboxnetadp) are properly updated if the linux kernel version changes during the next apt-get upgrade. For Debian it is available in Lenny backports and in the normal repository for Squeeze and later. The dkms package can be installed through the Synaptic Package manager or through the following command:

sudo apt-get install dkms

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4 Responses

  1. Instead of editing /etc/apt/sources.list I would strongly recommend creating a .list file under /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ instead i.e. /etc/apt/sources/lidt.d/virtualbox.list

    It’s a much more “clean” way of adding repositories (and the “correct” way actually)… 😉

  2. Filename should have been: /etc/apt/sources.list.d/virtualbox.list

  3. jim says:

    Hey I can’t get my Ub 11.04 vm’s to work with this. ( Hosting on 10.04 ) Has any one else had this problem and knows of a fix?

  4. Siert says:

    Why not create an Ubuntu PPA for the latest VirtualBox?

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