BackTrack 4 Beta Released

February 11, 2009 – 6:15 AM

This is it!  After many months of effort from the Remote Exploit Dev team, BackTrack 4 Beta is ready and available.  I thought I’d post up some “getting started” notes, to help people out with the first surge of questions.

• Default password to BackTrack 4 hasn’t changed, still root / toor.
• KDE 3 is being used in BT4. We tried KDE 4, really, we did. It sucked. Maybe 4.2 in BT4 final.
• Most of the KDE “apt gettable” packages have “kde3” appended to their names. So “apt-get install kate-kde3” is good, “apt-get install kate” is bad. Use “apt-cache search ” to search for packages to install.
• Kernel sources included in /usr/src/linux.
• DHCP disabled by default on boot, you need to /etc/init.d/networking start
• If you do an HD install and want to restore networking (DHCP) to be enabled at boot, type “update-rc.d networking defaults“.
• Getting a live USB install is nice and easy with Unetbootin
• VMware users – to fix the KDE resolution, type “fixvmware” before starting X.
• Vmware tools and kernel modules compile perfectly on VMWare 6.5.1
• If you can’t get X to work, first try to autogenerate an xorg.conf by typing “Xorg -configure” and try using the generated conf file. If that bums out, you can revert to VESA by typing “fixvesa“.
• Wireless networking in KDE can be started with KnetworkManager (/etc/init.d/NetworkManager)
• Various drivers can be found in /opt/drivers (various madwifi branches, video drivers for Nvidia and HP 2133’s).
• Installation of BT4 to HD is similar to BT3. (tip – dont forget to modify /etc/fstab after the install. Change the first line from aufs / aufs …. to the corresponding device and filesystem. For example, on my box it’s /dev/sda3 / reiserfs defaults 0 0, as my root partition is on sda3 and i used the resiserfs filesystem).
• The warning message “W: GPG error: http://ppa.launchpad.net intrepid Release: The following signatures couldn’t be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY CB2F6C86F77B1CA9” when “apt-get update” occurs as the Intrepid KDE 3 repos do not use a GPG key. We will eventually host these package in our own repo.
• To generate ssh keys for the first time type “sshd-generate“
• Conky takes a while to load.

Download:

ISO:
http://www.remote-exploit.org/cgi-bin/fileget?version=bt4-beta-iso

VMWare Image:
http://www.remote-exploit.org/cgi-bin/fileget?version=bt4-beta-vm