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What's New in VirtualBox 4.3?

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Great news: Oracle VM VirtualBox 4.3 is available from today!

Let's take a quick look at what's new:

New Platforms

We're at that time of year when vendors are releasing new versions of their platforms, ready to be installed onto new hardware offerings for the upcoming holiday season. So welcome Mac OS X 10.9 ( "Mavericks" ), Microsoft Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2, and all the new Linux distributions too.

And so it is only natural that VirtualBox 4.3 should add support for these new platforms too.

But sometimes that is easier said than done. For example, some of the new platforms are designed for tablet, or laptop/tablet hybrid platforms and so use a multi-touch interface to navigate around the system. This all means that VirtualBox has to deliver a multi-touch virtual device that the guests can use, which is exactly what we did in 4.3. So if you're looking to check out such a system, such as Windows 8(.1), remember to choose the correct pointing device:

multi-touch

Another similarity about the new platforms is the increased use of desktop "eye-candy", whether it is translucency, fade-in and out effects, or instant zoom. This means that we've had to improve our 3d acceleration support for guests such as Fedora, seen here on a Mac OS X 10.9 host, using a zoomed out view of running apps and a scaled workspace viewer on the right hand side:

Fedora 19

(Don't forget to update your Guest Additions to the 4.3 version to get this going.)

We also improved the multi-monitor support especially when you are using multiple virtual monitors with multiple physical displays in full screen mode.

Hypervisor improvements

Another significant, but largely invisible change in 4.3 concerns the hypervisor itself. We have significantly revamped the internals of VirtualBox as a platform for future performance enhancements. Today, this has mainly improved boot times of guests, but we'll be building upon this in forthcoming updates.

Networking Improvements

In the Networking area we've got 3 bits of news:

  1. IPv4 AND IPv6 almost everywhere - Host-only, Internal, Bridged and our new NAT Network mode now all offer IPv6 to guests;
  2. IPv6 in VRDP - You can remotely connect to the consoles of your virtual machines via RDP over IPv6;
  3. New NAT Network mode - yet another way of configuring the network of your vm's...

Our existing NAT mode puts each guest vm on it's own private network. This is nice and easy and has served us very well over the years.

At the same time, many people use our Host-only networking to run multiple vm's on a private network that can talk to each other and also the host.

But what yet another group of people wanted was a private network where the guests could talk to each other but also to the internet too (or at least the network beyond the host). So this is what the new NAT Network mode offers. Diagrammatically, it looks like this:

Diagram

and the configuration dialog looks like this:

Dialogs

Hopefully you can see that this new NAT Network can be IPv6 or IPv4 and has an optional DHCP service. Also Port Forwarding is available to allow connections into the private network from the outside world.

Other Bells and Whistles

There are lots of other smaller improvements in 4.3 but 2 of my favorites are:

Video Capture

4.3 comes with a built-in video capture facility to record the contents of your guest's screens. The resultant movie is stored in .webm format so can be played back by most movie players or even Google Chrome.

Virtual Webcam

An extremely cool (but only experimental at this stage) feature is the VirtualBox virtual webcam device. This allows the guest to use the webcam of the host so that you can use Skype or Google Hangouts from within your guest. (Look for a separate blog on this feature)

What next?

In the time it has taken you to read this blog you could have downloaded 4.3 from the Oracle or community site to kick the tires yourself.

But there's still time, VirtualBox is only around 100Mb. Or if you were "born not to lead but to read" (apologies to Matt Groening), take a peek at the User Guide.

All in all, another solid release, one that we hope you'll enjoy discovering.

- FB

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Urluba
4053 days ago
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Near Paris
sneijder345
1013 days ago
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Google va inclure nos noms et portraits dans les publicités en ligne

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La mise à jour du 11 octobre 2013 des conditions d'utilisation de Google avertit que désormais "votre nom et votre photo de profil peuvent s'afficher dans les produits Google (y compris dans les avis, la publicité et d'autres contextes commerciaux)". En clair : votre identité (prénom, nom, photo) et celle de vos proches pourront être utilisées pour promouvoir des publicités...
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Urluba
4057 days ago
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Je sens que ça va être sympa ces pubs :)
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C'est parti pour Les Cités d'Or au cinéma !

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Et c’est via le financement participatif que l’adaptation au cinéma des Mystérieuses Cités d’Or verra peut être le jour . Nous vous en avions parlé en avril dernier, le...
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Urluba
4060 days ago
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Curieux ce désir de vouloir flinguer à tout prix ses souvenirs de jeunesse
Near Paris
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PHP On Google App Engine Now Generally Available

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PHP is now in preview on Google App Engine, fully available to the general public. The preview status means that it is no longer necessary for developers to whitelist their applications for deployment.

Google launched PHP, its fourth run-time language, at Google I/O earlier this year. One of the world’s most popular programming languages, PHP, PHP is at the heart of such services as Facebook, WordPress and Drupal.

Since introducing PHP, Google has developed a number of new features, features such as a plug-in for WordPress a plugin for WordPress on Google App Engine and the ability toread and write files from PHP.

Developers may develop, test and deploy apps through Google’s App Engine PHP application. Developers can also create, test and deploy projects fromDevTableorCodeEnvy, both integrated developer environments.Developers that use their desktop can build, run, debug, and deploy Google App Engine PHP applicationsfrom within JetBrain’s PHPStorm IDE.

When launched at Google I/O, the PHP runtime was the top-requested top requested feature with customers. That makes this update an important one for developers using the Google App Engine platform.

According to Web Technology Surveys, PHP is used by 81.2% of all websites. But websites web sites. But web sites are changing and far more focused on mobile and the cloud. That’s evident this week at the Zend PHP Conference, Conference, where there is an emphasis on building out APIs, dynamic, mobile backends back-ends and applications that run entirely in the cloud.

Other PaaS environments that offer PHP support include Zend’sPHP Cloud, Jelastic and EngineYard.


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Urluba
4060 days ago
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Nest Labs' Next Product To Be A Smoke Detector, Per Reports

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The Nest Learning Thermostat is about to get a sibling. The Protect. If this report is correct, the company behind the incredibly popular Learning Thermostat is prepping a smoke detector. Yep, a smoke detector, reportedly called Protect, detector — which sounds about right for Nest Labs.

Co-founder and VP of Engineering Matt Rogers recently told me in an interview (view below) that the company is targeting all the white crap in our homes. The boring, the mundane, the products like the thermostat that were previously unloved and ignored. Nest wants to reinvent them. And with the smoke detector, there is a lot to reinvent.

The report is light on details, speculating heavily that the smoke detector could be tied to a subscription account (not likely), link with Learning Thermostat directly (plausible), and hand gestures could silence the alarm (likely).

But the lowly smoke detector is ripe for reinventing and Nest is the company to do it. Like the thermostat before it, the smoke detector is a disconnected device but plays a vital role in homes. Yet, it’s a dumb device. If it smells smoke, it yells. But what if you’re out of the house? What if you know *know* you’re going to burn bacon and the smoke detector is located on a 15-foot ceiling? What if you want to check the status of the battery? A connected smoke detector makes a whole lot of sense.

Nest Labs declined to comment.


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Urluba
4074 days ago
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J'attends de voir le prix de cet hypothétique détecteur #nest :)
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Google Alerts Brings Back Support for Feeds

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Two months ago, when Google Reader disappeared, Google Alerts dropped support for feeds. Now feeds are back and they look just like before. Feeds continue to include references to Google Reader.



"As you can see, you have the option within 'deliver to' to deliver the alert to a feed. After you click 'create alert', you will be taken to the manage Google Alerts page where you will find the RSS URL you can copy and paste into your preferred RSS reader," informs Search Engine Land. (Feeds actually use Atom, not RSS.)

It's not clear why this feature was removed, but I wouldn't mind to see Google Reader back online. Quietly brilliant.
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Urluba
4087 days ago
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#RSS back from the dead
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4 public comments
bogorad
4085 days ago
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Hooray!
Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain
samuel
4087 days ago
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Having just fixed issues with thousands of Google News feeds this morning, let's see how long this lasts.
Cambridge, Massachusetts
analogue
4087 days ago
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What's up with Google, really...
New York, USA
angelchrys
4087 days ago
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Hooray!
Overland Park, KS
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