The Government has offered Australia's three mobile operators, and vividwireless, renewal of their existing spectrum allocated on 15 year licences in the late 90s and early 2000s at set prices, while the Government expects to rake in $3 billion.
Sun has released a major update to its VirtualBox cross-platform virtualisation software. Changes include support for 2D video acceleration for Windows guests.
VirtualBox is Sun's x86 virtualisation software that's available in two versions.
The open source edition is available under the GPL, but is only available from Sun as source code.
The full version is also available free of charge, but under a personal use and evaluation licence. According to the licence, personal use "requires that you use the Product on the same Host Computer where you installed it yourself and that no more than one client connect to that Host Computer at a time for the purpose of displaying Guest Computers remotely."
So it doesn't exclude ongoing use in a commercial context, providing users personally install the software. If that's not feasible, non-academic organisations need to buy licences from Sun.
The full version includes everything from the open source edition, plus an RDP server and USB support (including USB over RDP so local USB devices can be used with a remote virtual machine).
VirtualBox 3.1.0 delivers several new features.
The ability to migrate a live VM between hosts might not be significant for desktop users, but it is a distinct advantage where VMs are running in a data centre as it allows workloads to be easily moved between physical servers.
For example, it means VMs can be moved from a lightly loaded server so it can be shut down to save energy. Or virtual machines could be rearranged across multiple servers to achieve load balancing.
2D video acceleration for Windows guests has been added. This feature uses the host video hardware for overlay stretching and colour conversion.
Other changes include the restoration of VM states from arbitrary snapshots (not just the most recent), the ability to attach multiple optical drives to arbitrary IDE controllers, and performance improvements for PAE and AMD64 guests.
Version 3.1 also includes an extensive list of bug fixes, refinements and other changes.
VirtualBox runs on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Solaris and OpenSolaris hosts. Supported guest operating systems include most versions of Windows since 98, many Linux distributions (kernel 2.6.13 or later recommended), and others.
David Bass
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