Some other cool features also made it into the release such as:

• OVF (Open Virtualization Format) appliance import and export
• OpenGL 3D acceleration for Linux and Solaris guests

The complete Changelog is here http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Changelog

Copying the lot from Linux to Mac simply broke the whole VirtualBox installation which failed to start at all once the files were in place. I had expected some errors, however not total breakage. Simply creating new machine configurations and re-attaching the disks was out of the questions as most of my machines had several snapshots which I didn’t manage to reconnect to the new machine configuration. So I started to look for trouble in the old configuration files.

For starters several configuration files had absolute paths to disk files, dvd/cd images, snapshots etc. As my files now resided in different folders this had to be changed. I started modyfying the VirtualBox.xml by hand and finally made som quick search and replaces. I also took the chance to remove some older dvd/cd images which were no longer on the system. Oh and then there was the version attribute of the VirtualBox element that had to be changed from 1.6-linux to 1.6-macosx.

Then for each VirtualBox machine I had to open the Machines/<machine name>/<machine name>.xml file and first correct the version stuff from 1.6-linux to 1.6 macosx.  Ones this was done I needed to remove any cd/dvd images no longer accessible by the machine such as the installation dvd for the guest additions which was “left in the drive” for most machines. This was a matter of simply deleting the Image element between each DVDDrive element. Now the configuration was correct and the Machine could be loaded by the interface. For every machine that was in their saved state I hade to discard the state as the CPU did not match the one under which the image was saved. Once discarded the Machine could be opened by the VirtualBox interface where it was a matter of clicking through all the options to make sure they were correct. One option that needed to be changed for each machine was the audio configuration. In linux it was set to Pulse audio and in Mac OS X it needed to be CoreAudio. Also any old network interfaces no longer available, such as host interfaces pointing at interface names such as eth0, eth1 or any tun interface not present in the new system had to be corrected.

So with the configuration all changed both manually and in the GUI the Machine was good to go. Once corrected and started it all worked great and I was very happy with VirtualBox! It even works better than it did in Linux as so far I have had a lot less problems with machines in their saved state breaking and refusing to start because of image inconsistencies.

One little annoying bugglet that was fixed was the clonehd function of VBoxManage. Now the cloned disks do actually work instead of ending up corrupted and unbootable as described here.

Another thing I have been having some issues with, which happens every now and then, is some unexplainable freeze when accessing files and folders on network shares in Vista. The changelog mentions a fix for this problem for Windows 2000 and I am hoping to see less of this problem now.

Another great improvement is that I can now finally run my 1023 guest machines all at the same time, this limit used to be 127

According to the changelog:
“New Host Interface Networking implementations for Windows and Linux hosts with easier setup (replaces TUN/TAP on Linux and manual bridging on Windows)”

I saw that the same issue I am having was reported here three hours ago. So if you are seeing a number of machines that fail to convert with the following message, this fix is for you.

“Assertion failed: [!name.isNull()] at ‘/home/vbox/vbox-2.1.0/src/VBox/Main/NetworkAdapterImpl.cpp’ (1068) in nsresult NetworkAdapter::loadSettings(const settings::Key&). Please contact the product vendor!.”

In order to fix the machines reporting this problem you need to:

1. Enter the directory of the Machine configuration, in my case the users name is patrik and the machine name is XP which results in the following directory /home/patrik/.VirtualBox/Machines/XP/
2. Make a copy/backup of the xml file in this directory and open it with a suitable editor
3. Look for any lines containing “<HostInterface TAPSetup” and simply delete it
4. If you have Virtualbox running simply press the refresh button of that machine and it should now convert

Obviously, you will need to setup the interface again using the configuration editor.

A REALLY annoying thing with the 2.0.6 release is that the number of failed resumes from a saved state have increased considerably for me. Having an increase from one or two problems with resuming a previously saved state a month to four five times since my upgrade a weak ago does not feel that great. Even though this might be totally unrelated to version 2.0.6 failures started increasing about that time.

As one of my main reasons for switching to Virtualbox was the overall speed of virtualization and the speed of resuming from a saved state, this obviously bugs me a lot. Even though VMWare was awfully slow at resuming it only failed once or twice in a year.

If you don’t want to end up loosing some work (as I did), make sure you don’t have any machines with their state saved (ie. make sure you shut all machines down) before you upgrade.

I am running the latest PC Suite 7.0.8.2 on Windows XP in Virtualbox 1.6.4. My current workaround is to connect to the phone over bluetooth from the same Virtual XP installation using a USB Bluetooth dongle. I must say that this part is a bit of a pain in the ….. Well, I guess you can’t have it all.

The issue has been reported at both Virtualbox and Nokia forums so hopefully there will be a fix soon.