Oracle Ends The Week With VirtualBox 4 Beta 4

Oracle's been on a wild ride the past few days. Besides Oracle's second quarter earnings having beaten their own expectations and that of the street, they've been releasing updates this week to a number of their Sun-acquired open-source projects. MySQL 5.5 was finally released, Open Office 3.3 made it out (along with a new web-based Oracle Cloud Office product), and their German counterparts have been releasing VirtualBox beta releases like mad.

In the past week and a half, Oracle has released four beta releases of their VM VirtualBox 4.0 software. VirtualBox 4.0 Beta 1 brought major changes and since then they have been releasing betas every few days to correct bugs and other issues. The third VirtualBox beta arrived just on Tuesday but has now been replaced by the fourth beta.

Oracle VM VirtualBox 4.0.0 Beta features fixed OpenGL support for Microsoft Windows 2000 guests, regressions from the third beta, fixes for their new "extension packs" functionality, a number of storage-related changes, and fixing the seamless mode with the 2D acceleration mode under Apple Mac OS X hosts.

Download links and the change-log for VirtualBox 4.0 Beta 4 is available from their forums. We're expecting the first release candidate for VirtualBox 4.0 to be not too far out.

Earlier this week we delivered our first VirtualBox 4.0 benchmarks compared against the stable VirtualBox 3.2 series as well as the Linux Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) virtualization mode. We also put out a couple tests looking at the OpenGL guest acceleration under Linux.