Hope you are all having a good Friday! Here's a tip for Oracle VM VirtualBox:
Question:
Should I install the Oracle VM VirtualBox Extension Pack and Guest Additions?
Answer by Andy Hall, Product Management Director, Oracle Desktop Virtualization and Chris Kawalek, Senior Principal Product Director, Oracle Desktop Virtualization:
Yes!
The Oracle VM VirtualBox Extension Pack enables four features:
- The virtual USB 2.0 device
- Intel PXE boot ROM with support for the E1000 network card
- Experimental support for PCI passthrough on Linux
- VirtualBox Remote Desktop Protocol (VRDP) support
You might also notice when you do upgrades of VirtualBox you might get a warning about missing hardware (Chris saw this just yesterday with USB 2.0, in fact). This means the extension pack and the VirtualBox versions are out of sync, so you'll need to install the latest extension pack.
The good news is that it's really easy. From the VirtualBox download page, just select the appropriate extension pack. Once it has downloaded, just double click and you'll be guided through the quick process.
For the Guest Additions, they are also worthwhile and easy to install. The Guest Additions provide device drivers and applications that help make working with a guest a much better experience. This includes things like mouse pointer integration, shared folders, seamless windows, and more. The Guest Additions are included in the VirtualBox installation folder as an .iso image that you can mount and then install from the guest.
If you have a question for us, post on Twitter with hashtag #askoraclevirtualization. See you next week!
-Chris