VirtualBox 4.2.6 leads Oracle virtualisation update

The developers of Oracle's VirtualBox have announced a maintenance update to the lead version of their virtualisation platform. Version 4.2.6 is released along with maintenance releases of older branches of the software: 3.2.16., 4.0.18 and 4.1.24. The changes in 4.2.6 are focused on stability and on correcting a number of regressions – there are no new features. Fixes include ensuring that stale virtual machine events are not sent to resetting VMs, fixing the appearance of text in the GUI, corrections to the 3D support, fixing hangs with some storage and adding network rate and disk usage to the metrics.

Linux-specific changes include a fix for leaking connections in bridged networking, support for ConsoleKit session in VBoxService's vminfo and a fix for a kernel crash during some remounts. The metrics for guest memory tracking have also been fixed. Some other changes include a fix for Windows 8 auto-login installation and new user-contributed translations for the Windows host installation. Details of the changes for 4.1.24, 4.0.18 and 3.2.16 are also available.

VirtualBox 4.2.6 is available for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and Solaris from the project's site; builds for specific Linux distributions are also available and include Ubuntu (12.10, 12.04LTS, 11.10, 11.04, 10.4 and 8.04), Debian 7 and 6, OpenSUSE 11.4, 12.1 and 12.2, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 and 10, Fedora 18, 17 and 16, Mandriva 2011.0, 2010.0 and 2010.1, and Oracle Linux/Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, 5 and 4. Downloads for older builds are also provided. VirtualBox binaries from version 4.0 onwards are licensed under the GPL; source code is available from the downloads page.

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