Yesterday, I had a discussion with an acquaintance in Second Life about VirtualBox, a really cool virtualization package for all major platforms. I already had VirtualBox installed on my machine, but I found out that it's no longer the latest version. Sun Microsystems recently acquired Innotek, and with it VirtualBox. So I went to the Downloads page and decided to download the binary package, since didn't feel like compiling the OSE version. One little RPM command later, and I was up and running.
The good things added in this VirtualBox are USB support(OSE doesn't have that) and added built-in support for more OSes. However, it's not without a small annoyance or two. In the previous VirtualBox, once I set up a virtual machine to run in Fullscreen mode, it stayed that way until either I shut the machine down or directly chose to take it out of fullscreen. In this new VirtualBox, it kept going back to windowed mode several times while a machine was booting up. Certainly not a showstopper, but quite annoying. And performance overall seemed pretty much the same, even after I tried enabling some options for Intel virtualization optimizers.
But all in all, not bad for Sun's first release after acquiring it. I give it four stars, and the fifth one will come once they fix that annoying fullscreen-to-window bug.
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