First Beta of Virtualbox 5.0 Available for Test

Last updated: April 3, 2015

Oracle virtualbox

A new major release of Oracle’s Virtualbox 5.0 now is available for test by releasing the Beta 1 version.

VirtualBox 5.0 is set to bring paravirtualization support for Windows/Linux guests, more instruction set extensions, bidirectional drag-and-drop support to guests, disk image encryption support, various UI improvements, and numerous bug-fixes.

Here is an incomplete list of changes in VBOX 5.0:

  • Paravirtualization support for Windows and Linux guests to improve time-keeping accuracy and performance
  • Make more instruction set extensions available to the guest when running with hardware-assisted virtualization and nested paging. Among others this includes: SSE 4.1, SSE4.2, AES-NI, POPCNT, RDRAND and RDSEED
  • xHCI Controller to support USB 3 devices (requires the Extension Pack)
  • Drag and drop support (bidirectional) for Windows, Linux and Solaris guests
  • Disk image encryption (requires the Extension Pack)
  • GUI: Detach mode: Terminate the GUI but keep the VM running and re-attach to a running VM process (see here).
  • GUI: VM guest-content scaling support (including 3D acceleration)
  • GUI: New User Interface settings page for customizing status-bar, menu-bar and guest-content scaling
  • GUI: New Encryption settings tab for customizing encryption options for disk images
  • GUI: HiDPI support including application icons and optional unscaled HiDPI output on Mac OS X (including 3D acceleration)
  • GUI: Hotplugging support for SATA disks
  • New, modular audio architecture for providing a better abstraction of the host audio backends
  • USB hard disks
  • Support for the NDIS6 networking framework on Windows (default on Vista and later)

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

  • VMM: improved timing on Solaris hosts with older VT-x hosts without preemption timers
  • VBoxManage: when exporting an appliance, support the suppression of MAC addresses, which means they will be always recreated on import, avoiding duplicate MAC addresses for VMs which are imported several times
  • USB: added USB traffic capturing
  • Made resizing X11 guests work more reliably
  • API: block the removal of the current snapshot if it has child snapshots (only relevant for VMs without snapshottable hard disks, their presence always prevented removal), which resulted in VM config corruption
  • API: mark VM configs with snapshots but without current snapshot as inaccessible, as this combination is nonsense
  • API: fix information for some automatically generated events (only with XPCOM, Windows host was not affected), which caused errors when getting some of the attributes over the webservice (bug #12379)
  • API: fix crashes in Java API clients using the XPCOM binding, happened with output parameters only (bug #11232)
  • API: a number of settings (e.g. network settings) can now also be changed when the VM is in saved state

Install Virtualbox 5.0 Beta in Ubuntu /Linux Mint:

NOTE: do NOT use this Beta release on production machines. It should be considered a bleeding-edge release meant for early evaluation and testing purposes.

1. Remove previous release via your package manager or by pressing below command in terminal:

sudo apt-get remove vitualbox*

2. Depends on your OS type, 32-bit (i386) or 64-bit (amd64), select download:

  • virtualbox-5.0_xxx~Ubuntu~precise_amd64/i386.deb for Ubuntu 12.04
  • virtualbox-5.0_xxx~Ubuntu~trusty_amd64/i386.deb for Ubuntu 14.04 and Linux Mint 17

from the download page.

3. Click to open the downloaded archive with Ubuntu Software Center and install it.

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One response to First Beta of Virtualbox 5.0 Available for Test

  1. Hm… no packages for Ubuntu 14.10? That’s really disappointing.
    Has anybody tried to use the trusty packages on Ubuntu 14.10?