VirtualBox 5.1.6 Brings Kernel 4.8 Fix [How-to Install]

Oracle VirtualBox 5.1.6, the third maintenance release for the 5.1 series, has been released with Linux 4.8 fixes for kernel display driver issues, various fixes to the Linux installer/additions packages, microphone input support, GUI, etc.

VirtualBox 5.1.6 Changelog:

• GUI: fixed issue with opening ‘.vbox’ files and it’s aliases
• GUI: keyboard grabbing fixes
• GUI: fix for passing through Ctrl + mouse-click (Mac OS X hosts only)
• GUI: fixed automatic deletion of extension pack files
• USB: fixed showing unknown device instead of the manufacturer or product description under certain circumstances
• XHCI: another fix for a hanging guest under certain conditions as result of the fix for bug #15747, this time for Windows 7 guests
• Serial: fixed high CPU usage with certain USB to serial converters on Linux hosts
• Storage: fixed attaching stream optimized VMDK images
• Storage: reject image variants which are unsupported by the backend
• Storage: fixed loading saved states created with VirtualBox 5.0.10 and older when using a SCSI controller
• Storage: fixed broken NVMe emulation if the host I/O cache setting is enabled
• Storage: fixed using multiple NVMe controllers if ICH9 is used
• NVMe: fixed a crash during reset which could happen under certain circumstances
• Audio: fixed microphone input
• Audio: fixed crashes under certain conditions
• Audio: fixed recording with the ALSA backend (5.1 regression)
• Audio: fixed stream access mode with OSS backend
• E1000: do also return masked bits when reading the ICR register, this fixes booting from iPXE
• BIOS: fixed 4bpp scanline calculation
• API: relax the check for the version attribute in OVF/OVA appliances
• Windows hosts: fixed crashes when terminating the VM selector or other VBox COM clients
• Linux Installer: fixed path to the documentation in .rpm packages (5.1.0 regression)
• Linux Installer: fixed the vboxdrv.sh script to prevent an SELinux complaint
• Linux hosts: don’t use 32-bit legacy capabilities
• Linux Additions: Linux 4.8 fix for the kernel display driver
• Linux Additions: don’t load the kernel modules provided by the Linux distribution but load the kernel modules from the official Guest Additions package instead
• Linux Additions: fix dynamic resizing problems in recent Linux guests
• User Manual: fixed error in the VBoxManage chapter for the getextradata enumerate example

Download Virtualbox:

The .deb binaries for Ubuntu 32-bit (i386) and 64-bit (amd64) available for download at the link below:

Virtualbox Linux Download

Download the package matches you OS type, then click install via Ubuntu Software.

Install Virtualbox from its Linux repository:

Oracle Virtualbox has an official Linux repository, so you can also follow the steps below to install/upgrade it:

1. Open terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T) and run command to add the repository:

sudo sh -c 'echo "deb http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian xenial contrib" >> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/virtualbox.list'

Depends your Ubuntu edition, replace xenial with wily (for 15.10), trusty (for 14.04, Mint 17.x, eOS 0.3), or precise (for 12.04).

2. Setup the keyring so to trust the packages from the repository:

wget -q https://www.virtualbox.org/download/oracle_vbox_2016.asc -O- | sudo apt-key add -

wget -q https://www.virtualbox.org/download/oracle_vbox.asc -O- | sudo apt-key add -

3. To upgrade from a previous 5.1 release, launch Software Updater

Or run commands in terminal to install or upgrade Virtualbox 5.1:

sudo apt update && sudo apt install virtualbox-5.1