Sun xVM VirtualBox 2.0.0 was released today, and is available for download from virtualbox.org. New features include 64-bit guest support, host interface networking on Solaris and OS X hosts, support for nested paging on modern AMD CPUs, and a native front end for the OS X client (and a move to Qt 4 for the others).
More detailed changelog here.
Congrats to the VirtualBox team on being the first (that I know of) to provide a working Seamless/Unity/Coherence mode for OpenSolaris 2008.05 guests on OS X. (I don’t know how long this has actually worked, I only tried it last night, in VB 1.6…)
Obviously a bit of work to do before it rivals the sort of integration that Windows guests enjoy in Fusion and Parallels, but it’s a good step in the right direction…
Was just pondering in the shower at the weekend (as you do) about what makes, say, MacOS X feel like a more cohesive desktop than even the latest and greatest GNOME.
One thing that came to mind was its integrated management of your media– in pretty much any Mac app where you might want to insert or edit multimedia content, you can immediately access your entire music, photo or video library in a familiar-looking window and drag it over from there. It’s built into the file selection dialog, too:
Of course, Apple only really let you manage your media library with their own software: iTunes, iPhoto, Aperture, iMovie, Final Cut etc. But it did get me wondering if there was a place for a freedesktop ‘media library’ spec, that would offer our users the same sort of quick, searchable access to their media content (be it local, remote, stored on Flickr, split across three DVDs, or any combination of the above) in any application that required it. And, of course, to do what Apple doesn’t, and allow any app to manage that content, if it needs to do so.
