Oracle announced a few days ago the launch of the new update for VirtualBox. Coming this to its version VirtualBox 6.1. For those who are unfamiliar with the software, they should know that it allows you to create and run virtual machines on Windows, macOS and Linux. In this new version of VirtualBox 6.1 many new features and enhancements announced, but we will only mention some of the most important ones.
Between these, we can highlight the support to import a virtual machine from the infrastructure in lto Oracle Cloud. The capabilities for exporting virtual machines to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure have been expanded, including ability to create multiple virtual machines without reloading them, in addition to added the ability to bind arbitrary tags to cloud images.
VirtualBox 6.1 also offers support for nested virtualization with Intel processors. The 3D support has been completely redesigned and the new version of the virtualization software no longer includes the "old 3D support" with VBoxVGA.
It is important to mention that this implementation is a experimental support for file transfers via shared clipboard. This file transfer system currently only works with Windows hosts and guests. The functionality must also be activated manually via VBoxManage, as it is not activated by default.
On the other hand in VirtualBox 6.1 also added support for version 5.4 of the Linux kernel, as well as support for hosts with up to 1024 cores. A new video acceleration mode is also available on Linux and macOS hosts with the VMSVGA graphics driver.
Among other new experimental features, as the vboxim-mount command is available on Linux hosts. Provides read-only access to NTFS, FAT, and ext2 / 3/4 file systems within a disk image.
As well many improvements have been made to the user interface, including an enhancement to the VISO creation dialogs and the file manager. Searching for virtual machines has also been improved and more details are available in the VM information panel. Still at the user interface level, it should be noted that VirtualBox shows the CPU load of the VM in the status bar of the CPU gauge.
In terms of storage, VirtualBox 6.1 offers experimental support for virtio-scsi, for hard drives and optical drives (including boot media in BIOS).
A new virtual keyboard with multimedia keys it is also available to allow access to guest systems. VirtualBox 6.1 still offers improved EFI support and a long series of various arrangements.
How to install VirtualBox 6.1 on Linux?
For those who are interested in being able to install this new version of VirtualBox on their distro, they can do so by following the instructions we share below.
If they are Debian, Ubuntu and derivative users We proceed to install the new version, we do this by opening a terminal and executing the following commands in it:
First we must add the repository to our sources.list
sudo sh -c 'echo "deb http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian $(lsb_release -sc) contrib" >> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/virtualbox.list'
Now we proceed to import the public key:
wget -q https://www.virtualbox.org/download/oracle_vbox_2016.asc -O- | sudo apt-key add -
sudo apt-get -y install gcc make linux-headers-$(uname -r) dkms
After that we go update our list of repositories:
sudo apt-get update
And finally we proceed to install the application to our system:
sudo apt-get install virtualbox-6.1
While for those who are Fedora, RHEL, CentOS users, we must do the following, which is to download the package with:
wget https://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/6.1.0/VirtualBox-6.1-6.1.0_135406_el8-1.x86_64.rpm
wget https://www.virtualbox.org/download/oracle_vbox.asc
In the case of The OpenSUSE 15 package for your system is this:
wget https://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/6.1.0/VirtualBox-6.1-6.1.0_135406_openSUSE150-1.x86_64.rpmwget https://www.virtualbox.org/download/oracle_vbox.asc
After that we type:
sudo rpm --import oracle_vbox.asc
And we install with:
sudo rpm -i VirtualBox-6.1-*.rpm
Now to verify that the installation was done:
VBoxManage -v
In the case of Arch Linux they can install from AUR, even though they require enabling some services for Systemd, so it is recommended that they use the Wiki to be able to install.
sudo pacman -S virtualbox