Free Mac OS X virtualiser released
Germany's Innotek has released the final version of its VirtualBox for Apple's operating system. Since Sun Microsystems took over the German firm at the end of February, the software has been renamed "Sun xVM VirtualBox". It allows 32 and 64-bit operating systems to be used within a virtual machine (VM). VirtualBox can assign a maximum of 300 MB to a VM running on Mac OS X.
One special feature in free for download VirtualBox, is the integrated VRDP Server, which provides access to a VM's screen via the network. You can even connect USB devices hooked up to a computer in your local network with a VM running on a different computer.
Although this release is not a beta version of VirtualBox, Sun says that the Mac version still has a few shortcomings. For instance, the software still does not support "Host Interface Networking", which means it cannot request an IP address from a DHCP server for its virtual network hardware and therefore has to use the host's IP address. Audio input is also not yet possible. Finally, VirtualBox does not support the VT-x in Intel's Core 2 Duo CPUs, even though you can already enable the setting in option menus.
(trk)
