Linuxseekers

The  sales of firearms are prohibited in many countries.  We're  indeed

very lucky that  the rights to use a powerful tool like Backtrack has not

been taken away from us!   Today  I would like to review the infamous

security distro, Backtrack 2.  For this review (not preview),  I used my

Dell Inspiron 600m notebook as the test PC. It  has  pentium M 1.4Ghz,

1Gb Sdram and Ati radeon r250 graphic card.

Remote-exploit.org  is  the home of BackTrack.  Backtrack 2 Final  has

just been released  on 3 march 2007  after  many months of testing. The

iso file is 690Mb in size.  Backtrack 2 is a livecd with option to install to

hard disk and usbkey.  It's based on Slax Live CD.

Backtrack has been recognized as a very powerful  security distro  and

its strength is considered on par with proprietary  security  tools. In  the

open source world,  it's  undisputedly  the  best.  Since  it  has  received

more and more interest especially from business community,  I  am not

surprised  to  see its  website  becoming  more  corporate-like.  Actually

Backtrack was conceived after  the merger of  two Linux security distro,

the Auditor and the Whax.  Imagine, it's free.  A million  thanks  to  Max

Moser and Mati Aharoni.

For your information,  Backtrack is currently ranked at 34th place at

distrowatch, based on the 30-day page hits.  I suppose security distro

is not everyone's cup of tea.

So, I loaded up the Backtrack 2 CD into my notebook's usb DVD-Rom.

It took me 80 seconds to boot up on  my Dell notebook.  It's runlevel 3.

Don't worry,  it has clearly printed out what  you need to do. The  user

is root and password is toor.

Once logged in  as root user,  I could either start  the Kde desktop  with

vesa driver giving me a 1024x768 at 75hz by executing  startx  at  the

shell interface or  start a fluxbox desktop by executing  fluxbox  at  the

shell interface.  If fluxbox is chosen, it would also use the  vesa  driver

with the same resolution.  Of course,  you  can  execute  xconf  to auto-

configure your graphic cards for better performance  prior to executing

either  startx  or  fluxbox  command.  Another command is  ati  that will

autoconfigure the ati card in your PC.