back to article Number 5 is alive! VirtualBox the fifth debuts

After a swift beta process, Oracle's VirtualBox desktop hypervisor has reached its fifth edition. VirtualBox's fourth iteration emerged in 2010, so in April Oracle decided it was due for some proper attention. That decision resulted in four betas and three release candidates emerging in short order, before Thursday saw the new …

  1. Khaptain Silver badge

    Availability

    Sounds good but where did you get it from. I am running 4.3.26 and is states itself as being the most recent version available ?

    1. PeeKay

      Re: Availability

      You can find it at the top of this page: https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads

      1. Khaptain Silver badge
        Happy

        Re: Availability

        Thanks for the Link, it successfully installed over my existing installation.

        ¨

        For info it might be necessary to go into the setting of the VM, General-Advanced and enable the BiDirectional Drag and Drop, no need to reboot the VM it works instantly...

  2. Richard Lloyd

    VirtualBox RPMs have the version number in the package name field

    Like the packaging fools at LibreOffice, VirtualBox puts the version number in the package name field of its RPMs, which is a major no-no. It means you can't look at the RPM info with "rpm -qi VirtualBox", but have to use something like "rpm -qi VirtualBox-5.0" instead.

    It also can prevent you switching up to the next major release depending on how that next release's RPM is presented. I removed my old VirtualBox 4.X RPM-based install and downloaded the 5.0 RPM from the VirtualBox site and manually installed the RPM. This worked nicely and I'm now on 5.0. Apart from one of my VMs (a 32-bit CentOS 6.6) badly scaling the window so all fonts were distorted, it seemed to work OK otherwise.

    1. Tom Chiverton 1

      Re: VirtualBox RPMs have the version number in the package name field

      That's intentional isn't it, to prevent unexpected major version updates.

    2. John Robson Silver badge

      Re: VirtualBox RPMs have the version number in the package name field

      @Richard Lloyd

      Is that to prevent accidental updates for the cautious, but more to the point, don't they have virtual packages whci point to the most recent version?

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: VirtualBox RPMs have the version number in the package name field

      I had some scaling issues with an opensuse tumbleweed VM which were KDE QT5 related but this was fixed in the beta 1 stage if I remember rightly.

    4. xenny

      Re: VirtualBox RPMs have the version number in the package name field

      I had scaling problems which went away when I updated the box guest additions, or whatever they are called.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Link?

    Why don't you post a link to the Virtualbox web site that opens in a new window? It would make it easier for us to take a look, while leaving the article open for reading

    1. knottedhandkerchief

      Re: Link?

      Press the Ctrl key if you want a new tab. Standard in browsers. If it opened in a new window, there's no way to override that behaviour.

    2. ssharwood

      Re: Link?

      True answer? Big night (on Reg duty), early start, usually do it but just forgot in this story. Will pop it in now.

    3. phuzz Silver badge
      Thumb Up

      Re: Link?

      On most browsers/OSs a middle mouse button (ie the scroll wheel) click will open a link in a new tab, whilst keeping focus on what you're reading.

  4. sjiveson

    Vagrant

    Those using Vagrant should delay upgrading, Vagrant v1.7.2 won't run;

    Vagrant has detected that you have a version of VirtualBox installed

    that is not supported. Please install one of the supported versions

    listed below to use Vagrant:

    4.0, 4.1, 4.2, 4.3

  5. Phuq Witt
    Unhappy

    Bi-directional! Schmectional!

    I've not tested on all my virtual machines yet, but on my Debian, Elementary and Mavericks VMs, bi-directional drag'n'drop still not working for me on an OSX host –and neither is Bi-directional shared clipboard.

    [And, yes, I have updated 'Guest Additions']

    1. xenny

      Re: Bi-directional! Schmectional!

      You need to enable it in the vm's settings

      1. Phuq Witt
        Unhappy

        Re: Bi-directional! Schmectional!

        I know. I've done that too.

        Still no workee.

  6. xenny

    Para-virt settings

    I found I had to explicitly enable these for each of my VMs. Setting default seems to result in it successfully offering hyper-v mode to windows guests and Kim to Linux guests, which was nice.

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