Audio recording was improved for ALSA and PulseAudio

Aug 16, 2017 21:25 GMT  ·  By

Oracle's Director of Product Management Simon Coter was pleased to announce on Wednesday the release and immediate availability for download of the second VirtualBox 5.2 Beta.

VirtualBox 5.2 is currently under heavy development, and a first Beta release was published a week ago, giving users a glimpse at the major new features coming to the open-source and cross-platform virtualization software from Oracle.

Focusing on improvements and regression fixes for the first Beta, VirtualBox 5.2 Beta 2 is here today to introduce support for the recently released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4 operating system in the Linux Additions component.

The new Beta also implements support in the GUI to permanently save the tools layout, fixes audio recording when using the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA) backend, along with distortions when using the PulseAudio sound system.

Other than that, it looks like it's no longer possible to decrease the size of a medium in the GUI, which shouldn't crash anymore on Mac OS X hosts if the Spotlight search functionality is used from file dialog.

VirtualBox 5.2 highlights

Apart from the obvious GUI enhancements and under-the-hood improvements, VirtualBox 5.2 will introduce major new features like the ability to export virtual machines to the Oracle Public Cloud for easy deployment of VMs across multiple VirtualBox installs.

Automatic, unattended guest OS installation is also coming to VirtualBox 5.2 later this year, which is a feature similar to the "Easy Install" functionality found on the commercial VMWare Workstation 6.5 and 7 virtualization apps. Also, there will be supported for the latest Linux kernel releases.

If you want to test out VirtualBox 5.2, you can download the Beta 2 builds on GNU/Linux, macOS, or Microsoft Windows operating systems right now through our web portal. However, please try to keep in mind that these are pre-release versions, so don't use them in production environments.