The Oracle Development Team who is in charge of VirtualBox recently released the release of the new corrective version for the 6.1 branch of VirtualBox, this being the new version "VirtualBox 6.1.4”In which about 17 bugs are fixed and a handful of improvements are added to the application.
One of the changes that stand out in this corrective version of VirtualBox 6.1.4 is that on Linux based guest systems Linux5.5 kernel support is provided y problem with access via shared directories is solved (shared folder) to disk images mounted through a loopback device.
Also the solution to the regressive change that appeared in branch 6.1 is highlighted which caused problems with the use of the ICEBP instruction on hosts with Intel CPUs, as well as the fix to the problem with loading guest systems with macOS Catalina, after installing the 10.15.2 update.
For USB, isochronous data transfer to a virtual machine is established using USB xHCI drivers.
Fixed issues with serial port buffer processing, which led to suspension of receiving data when the queue was reset.
Improved support for forwarding a serial port to a virtual machine on Windows hosts and improved GUI localization.
Of the other changes:
- VBoxManage resumed support for the –clipboard option in the modifyvm command. On macOS hosts, this is a more secure runtime and osxfuse (3.10.4) is updated.
- On Windows hosts, shared directory support for POSIX-defined file extension semantics (O_APPEND) is improved. The ability to start VMs through Hyper-V resumes.
- In BIOS implementation, a non-ATA disk availability indicator is provided and data about EFI support is added to the DMI table. The VGA BIOS has reduced the size of the stack used in INT 10h controllers.
How to install VirtualBox 6.1.4 on Ubuntu and derivatives?
This new version of virtualBox 6.1.4 is not available in the official Ubuntu package repository. But we can easily add VirtualBox package repository in Ubuntu and derivatives and install VirtualBox 6.1.4 from there.
Before installing VirtualBox, they need to ensure that hardware virtualization is enabled. If they are using an Intel processor, they must enable VT-x or VT-d from their computer's BIOS.
Installing from repository
To add the official VirtualBox package repository, they should open a terminal with Ctrl + Alt + T and run the following command:
echo "deb https://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian $(lsb_release -cs) contrib" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/virtualbox.list
Done this now We must add the public PGP key from the official VirtualBox packages repository to the system.
Otherwise, we will not be able to use the official VirtualBox package repository. To add the public PGP key from the official VirtualBox package repository, run the following command:
wget -q https://www.virtualbox.org/download/oracle_vbox_2016.asc -O- | sudo apt-key add -
Now that the official VirtualBox package repository is ready to use, we can install VirtualBox 6.1.4
First, we need to update the APT package repository with the following command:
sudo apt-get update
Once this is done, now we are going to proceed to install VirtualBox to the system with:
sudo apt install virtualbox-6.1
And ready with it, we can use the new version of VirtualBox in our system.
Installing from deb package
Another method with which we can install VirtualBox in Ubuntu or in some derivative, is by downloading the deb package corresponding to the version of Ubuntu you have. The deb package can be obtained from the official VirtualBox website.
For example for Ubuntu 19.10:
wget https://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/6.1.4/virtualbox-6.1_6.1.4-136177~Ubuntu~eoan_amd64.deb
Or for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS:
wget https://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/6.1.4/virtualbox-6.1_6.1.4-136177~Ubuntu~bionic_amd64.deb
In case of still being on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, the package that you occupy is this:
wget https://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/6.1.4/virtualbox-6.1_6.1.4-136177~Ubuntu~xenial_amd64.deb
Finally, you can install the downloaded package with your preferred package manager or from the terminal by executing the following command:
sudo dpkg -i virtualbox-6.1_6.1.4*.deb