14 DAY TRIAL // Today, July 7, 2016, Oracle has had the pleasure of announcing that the first Release Candidate (RC) version of the upcoming VirtualBox 5.1 virtualization software is available for public testing.
Coming two weeks after the release of the third Beta build (yes, really, VirtualBox 5.1 is out of Beta), the first Release Candidate brings more fixes and improvements to the important update of the open-source and cross-platform virtualization software used on all major computer operating systems.
Among the changes that have been implemented since Beta 3, we can mention that there are multiple bug fixes and enhancements to the graphical user interface (GUI), such as a few Qt5 migration regressions, a VBox GUI issue on Solaris 10, and improved keyboard capturing on X11 hosts.
Additionally, the X2-APIC feature is now enabled by default for Linux guests, the screenshot functionality has been improved, the resolve.conf file is correctly parsed with multiple separators, a new audio code has been enabled, and some memory leaks have been addressed to improve handling of DMG files.
Better support for Linux kernel 4.6 or later
VirtualBox 5.1 Release Candidate 1 also adds better support for the Linux 4.6 kernel series, as well as the upcoming Linux kernel 4.7, which should be out in the coming weeks. Moreover, it should now be possible to install the bridged networking drivers on Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP OSes, and a crash has been patched for Solaris hosts.
Oracle has released VirtualBox 5.1 Release Candidate 1 for all supported operating systems, and you can download the binaries for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows right now via our website. Please keep in mind, though, that this is a pre-release version, not suitable for use in production environments. There should be one more RC build before VirtualBox 5.1 hits the stable channel.