With the Sun now set, Oracle has released VirtualBox 3.2 finally In particular some lovely optimisations for the newer Intel Core i5/i7 processors, Large Page support (which helps significantly on Windows x64 and Linux) as well as a very welcome optimisation on the networking in VirtualBox as well as multi-monitor support for Windows Guests. Whats more RDP sessions are now accelerated (VRDP).
This version is a major update. The following major new features were added:
Following the acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle Corporation, the product is now called Oracle VM VirtualBox and all references were changed without impacting compatibility
Experimental support for Mac OS X guests (see the manual for more information)
Memory ballooning to dynamically in- or decrease the amount of RAM used by a VM (64-bit hosts only) (see the manual for more information)
Page Fusion automatically de-duplicates RAM when running similar VMs thereby increasing capacity. Currently supported for Windows guests on 64-bit hosts (see the manual for more information)
CPU hot-plugging for Linux (hot-add and hot-remove) and certain Windows guests (hot-add only) (see the manual for more information)
New Hypervisor features: with both VT-x/AMD-V on 64-bit hosts, using large pages can improve performance (see the manual for more information); also, on VT-x, unrestricted guest execution is now supported (if nested paging is enabled with VT-x, real mode and protected mode without paging code runs faster, which mainly speeds up guest OS booting)
Support for deleting snapshots while the VM is running
Support for multi-monitor guest setups in the GUI for Windows guests (see the manual for more information)
USB tablet/keyboard emulation for improved user experience if no Guest Additions are available (see the manual for more information).
LsiLogic SAS controller emulation (see the manual for more information)
RDP video acceleration (see the manual for more information)
NAT engine configuration via API and VBoxManage
Use of host I/O cache is now configurable (see the manual for more information)
Guest Additions: added support for executing guest applications from the host system (replaces the automatic system presimparation feature; see the manual for more information)
VirtualBox Version 3.2.0 is a major update. The following major new features were added:
Following the acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle Corporation, the product is now called Oracle VM VirtualBox and all references were changed without impacting compatibility.
Experimental support for Mac OS X guests
Memory ballooning to dynamically in- or decrease the amount of RAM used by a VM (64-bit hosts only) (see the manual for more information)
CPU hot-plugging for Linux (hot-add and hot-remove) and certain Windows guests (hot-add only) (see the manual for more information)
New Hypervisor features: with both VT-x/AMD-V on 64-bit hosts, using large pages can improve performance (see the manual for more information); also, on VT-x, unrestricted guest execution is now supported (if nested paging is enabled with VT-x, real mode and protected mode without paging code runs faster, which mainly speeds up guest OS booting)
Support for deleting snapshots while the VM is running
Support for multi-monitor guest setups in the GUI (see the manual for more information)
USB tablet/keyboard emulation for improved user experience if no Guest Additions are available
LsiLogic SAS controller emulation
RDP video acceleration
NAT engine configuration via API and VBoxManage
Guest Additions: added support for executing guest applications from the host system
OVF: enhanced OVF support with custom namespace to preserve settings that are not part of the base OVF standard
In addition, the following items were fixed and/or added:
VMM: fixed crash with the OpenSUSE 11.3 milestone kernel during early boot (software virtualization only)
VMM: fixed OS/2 guest crash with nested paging enabled
VMM: fixed Windows 2000 guest crash when configured with a large amount of RAM (bug 5800)
VMM: fixed massive display performance loss (AMD-V with nested paging only)
Linux/Solaris guests: PAM module for automatic logons added
GUI: guess the OS type from the OS name when creating a new VM
GUI: added VM setting for passing the time in UTC instead of passing the local host time to the guest (bug 1310)
GUI: fixed seamless mode on secondary monitors (bugs 1322 and 1669)
GUI: added –seamless and –fullscreen command line switches (bug 4220)
Settings: be more robust when saving the XML settings files
Mac OS X: rewrite of the CoreAudio driver and added support for audio input (bug 5869)
Mac OS X: external VRDP authentication module support (bug 3106)
Mac OS X: Moved the realtime dock preview settings to the VM settings (no global option anymore). Use the dock menu to configure it.
Mac OS X: added the VM menu to the dock menu
3D support: fixed corrupted surface rendering (bug 5695)
3D support: fixed VM crashes when using ARB_IMAGING (bug 6014)
3D support: fixed assertion when guest applications uses several windows with single OpenGL context (bug 4598)
3D support: added GL_ARB_pixel_buffer_object support
3D support: added OpenGL 2.1 support
3D support: fixed Final frame of Compiz animation not updated to the screen (Mac OS X only) (bug 4653)
Added support for virtual high precision event timer (HPET)
LsiLogic: Fixed detection of hard disks attached to port 0 when using the drivers from LSI
Quick note after seeing this on Kotaku, Mektek has released MechWarrior 4 for download for free (as in totally). Bring back those memories! The site’s been MC hammered right now but grab the 1.7Gb and lock & load
We started with the existing Jake2 Java port of the Quake II engine, then used the Google Web Toolkit (along with WebGL, WebSockets, and a lot of refactoring) to cross-compile it into Javascript. You can see the results in the video above — we were honestly a bit surprised when we saw it pushing over 30 frames per second on our laptops (your mileage may vary)!
At the moment you have to build from source and mess about a bit, but fear not, I followed the guide on OSNews by Kroc on our MacBook Pro and it worked quite well, yet to try it on Linux.
As for .NET 4.0 compatibility, whilst not officially announced, we’ve been using Ninject 2.0 (betas) and now just moving to the final release with .NET 4.0 without issues. All documentation and material are available on the wiki however.
Compared to Beta 2, its a smooth and quite enjoyable experience and I’m very much waiting for the final. The performance of this release is insanely good and finally fixes some annoying performance issues we noticed in WPF in Beta 2 (lets forget Beta 1).
Well finally Google has released Chrome 4.0 and with it extensions support amongst the many other features which finally brings some much needed juice to the browser. I’ve been running Firefox and Chrome simultaneously (Chrome for gmail & google apps, firefox for daily browsing) but I have a feeling I may change to using Chrome full time now.
Some cool extensions to try (most are from Firefox)
Xmarks Bookmarks Sync – I’ve been using FoxXmarks to sync my bookmarks for a while now, so its only natural I install this for Chrome. You can also stick with the standard Bookmark sync via Google which you’ll need a Google account for.
Chromed. There’s lots more if you’re into Facebook, Twitter and all the other fancy things these days, even one for uTorrent! Download the latest build and give things a go!
PS. You don’t need to restart Chrome to install extensions either!
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Disclaimer is tiny just to make it look fancy spansy.
In particular some lovely optimisations for the newer Intel Core i5/i7 processors, Large Page support (which helps significantly on Windows x64 and Linux) as well as a very welcome optimisation on the networking in VirtualBox as well as multi-monitor support for Windows Guests. Whats more RDP sessions are now accelerated (VRDP).
Anyway, here’s a bit good of news, the 