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Update: Found a very easy fix!

So some of you may know that I’m a big, big fan of VirtualBox. I’ve found it to be intuitive, very functional, and it really lets me get the most out of my MacBook. I have five operating systems on it currently (two Linux, one BSD, OpenSolaris and Windows XP) and it’s been one of my favorite apps for a while now.

Needless to say I was eagerly anticipating their recent 3.0.0 release.

Except that this new release, which apparently adds SMP stuff and greatly improves the 3D acceleration available to the hosts, has completely hosed networking in my Linux OS’s. I can ping an external server about once or twice, and then as far as I can tell, everything coming or going to eth0 just stops making it. This effect was seen, identically, on both Ubuntu Jaunty and Fedora 11, both 32bit. So basically, I can’t use either of those right now. Windows seems fine, and I haven’t tried the other two yet.

I’ve seen other reports of this around on various boards, so I’m very hopeful it’ll get fixed soon. But if you are a VirtualBox user with Linux hosts, and you haven’t upgraded to 3.0.0 yet, I’d strongly recommend holding off until the next release.

Update: After hunting around on the forums some, it turns out that by switching the virtual NIC to one of the Intel options fixes the networking problems. It’s trivial to do. I still feel this probably shouldn’t have gotten through Q/A before getting released, but it’s definitely not hard to get working.