14 DAY TRIAL // Oracle's Director of Product Management Simon Coter recently announced the availability of the first Beta release of the upcoming VirtualBox 5.2 major version of the open-source and cross-platform virtualization software.
VirtualBox 5.2 looks to be a great release that should allow users to export virtual machines to the Oracle Public Cloud so that they can easily use them on other machines without all the hustle of exporting VMs to external drives and then import them to another VirtualBox installation.
Another interesting change coming to VirtualBox 5.2 later this year is automatic, unattended guest OS installation, similar to the "Easy Install" feature found on the commercial VMWare Workstation 6.5 and 7 virtualization software. Additionally, VirtualBox 5.2 will improve the Virtual Machine selector GUI.
The handling of Virtual Machine Tools and Global Tools was improved as well, and VirtualBox 5.2 promises to add new, fresh icons to the graphical user interface for a refreshed experience on all supported platforms, including GNU/Linux, macOS, and Microsoft Windows.
Accessibility support, audio improvements, and more
Among other noteworthy improvements coming to VirtualBox 5.2, we can mention the implementation of accessibility support in the GUI, better video mode handling on EFI support, as well as asynchronous data processing support in separate threads for HDA audio emulation.
Support for host device callbacks was added as well for audio support, which should kick in when adding or removing an audio device, and it looks like there will be an optional device enumeration feature implemented for audio backends. Of course, many other enhancements and bug fixes are present so go out and test.
"Please use our VirtualBox Beta Feedback forum to report any problems with the Beta. Please concentrate on reporting regressions since VirtualBox 5.1.26," said Simon Coter, Director of Product Management at Oracle. "Feedback and comments are obviously appreciated."
VirtualBox 5.2 Beta 1 is available for download on GNU/Linux, macOS, and Microsoft Windows operating systems right now if you want to an early taste of the new features, but please be aware of the fact that this is a pre-release version, so don't use it for any production work.