Virtual Box Directly from Oracle

[geezer]

Been running the Virtual Box from the repositories, version 5.0.4.

Was looking at the Oracle vbox web site and I notice that they have 5.0.10 released.

Is there any advantage to installing that version over the 5.0.4 in the repository?

[GreyGeek]

I've tried them both. The repository version is not the bleeding edge but the version in the repository, 4.3.10-dfsg-1ubuntu5, runs perfectly for me in 14.04.

[claydoh]

Been running the Virtual Box from the repositories, version 5.0.4.

Was looking at the Oracle vbox web site and I notice that they have 5.0.10 released.

Is there any advantage to installing that version over the 5.0.4 in the repository?

Not really, unless the more recent version is known to fix a bug or compatibility issue you are having.



Wow, I sure don't pay attention. I just noticed that VB in 5.x bi-directional drag and drop support between between guests and hosts

[GreyGeek]

Wow, I sure don't pay attention. I just noticed that VB in 5.x bi-directional drag and drop support between between guests and hosts

That feature is in the 4.3.10 version from the 14.04 repository that I am running.

[claydoh]

VirtualBox 5.0 (released 2015-07-09)

This is a major update. The following major new features were added:

Paravirtualization support for Windows and Linux guests to improve time-keeping accuracy and performance (see the manual for more information)
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, AVX, AVX-2, AES-NI, POPCNT, RDRAND and RDSEED
xHCI Controller to support USB 3 devices (see the manual for more information)
Drag and drop support (bidirectional) for Windows, Linux and Solaris guests
Disk image encryption (see the manual for more information)
VMs can now be started in separate mode. The VM process is started headless while the frontend runs as a separate process which can be terminated without stopping the VM.
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 architectandure for providing a better abstraction of the host audio backends
Support for the NDIS6 networking framework on Windows (default on Vista and later)

Sent from my LG G4

[GreyGeek]

Strange. Bi-directional drag and drop has been a setting in VB 4.3 for as long as I have been using it. When I was running XP as a guest I had bi-directional set. I'm still running Arch as a guest. I am going to check it out. BTW, one can still use shared folders to transfer files between the host and guest.

[geezer]

Ok - A new update from the repository came through yesterday.

They updated the repository to 5.0.10. So now they have the latest Virtual Box from Oracle.

[royleith]

@ geezer

That's great news. I installed the website version when I moved to 15.10 and both it and the extensions installed fine. I uninstalled some git programs installed in error and this removed about half a gigabyte of system files. I reinstalled 15.10 and now non of the website versions would install because of dependency failures. I ruefully went back to the repository version which was fine, but I thought I had lost all the improvements including much better window and screen handling.

It looks like my virtual joy is complete.