How do you know a distro is severe and utterly serious? This.
Kudos to Backtrack Linux. Twice putting out a nigh irreplaceable distro is one tremendous feat; to do so while also providing stellar documentation is a victory in a league for which I can't think of any competition.
Backtrack Linux 4 was an impressive distro, even for the rest of us who hadn't the first clue where to start with a distro dedicated to security and penetration testing. At the level I was able to work with it, Backtrack worked without a hitch, and even to the most ignorant of us was beautifully cohesive and unified. The Backtrack experience was compelling enough that I found myself booting into Backtrack despite not having any clear plan what I was going to do with it. Each time my ambition to learn one of its many powerful tools made me face the fact that I just didn't have the foundations to build upon.
When a tweet revealed that Backtrack 5 had been released, I once again got cocky and dropped everything to torrent the livecd and the VMware virtual machine.
The 32-bit Gnome ISO worked without a hitch on my Toshiba Portege. Backtrack 5 ran perfectly from the livecd on each machine with which I tried it.
The VMware (32-bit Gnome) virtual machine works beautifully as well. Installing VMware tools, however, takes either a good familiarity with running linux distros in a VMware environment or following carefully along with Backtrack's documentation.
Strangely, the documentation changed between the installation of my second Backtrack virtual machine and my third installation. I found myself having to slightly modify the documented steps.
Here's a chronicle of what worked from someone barely competent to navigate Gnome or a bash shell.
Downloading and Extracting
- http://www.backtrack-linux.org/downloads/
- Be kind and register and download.
- Select 32-bit VMware (I went with the Gnome torrent) (direct downloads are available as of the 12th of May, 2011).
- Download and open with your torrent client.
- Seed!
- The download is in 7z format. If you need it, download 7-zip. Or,
- In Natty, you may need to install p7zip: sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install p7zip. Open the downloaded file in Archive Manager, choose extract, and wait for everything to extract - on an i7 with 8GB ram, it was about a 5-7 minute wait.
- Open your VMware product, Open Virtual Machine, navigate to BT5-GNOME-VM-32 (or whatever your extracted folder is called). Open BT5-GNOME-VM-32.vmx. Click play; a dialog box will ask if the VM was moved or copied. Follow the suggestion and select "I copied it"
- Backtrack 5 is done booting when you get a prompt to login.
- At the prompt, login as root with the password toor.
for installing VMware tools, I used this resource. If you're using an older version of VMware, there another resource here. I just found these instructions, which I've confirmed to work well. Nevertheless:
- In the VM menu, select Reinstall VMware Tools.
What follows are the instructions from Backtrack followed by # and comments based on my installation experiences.
root@bt:~# mkdir /mnt/cdrom # already existed root@bt:~# mount /dev/cdrom3 /mnt/cdrom/ # mount /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom worked fine mount: block device /dev/hdc is write-protected, mounting read-only root@bt:~# cp -rf /mnt/cdrom/VM* /tmp/ # no problem root@bt:~# cd /tmp/ # no problem root@bt:/tmp# tar zxpf VMwareTools-8.4.3-282344.tar.gz # 8.4.6-385536.tar.gz instead in my environment root@bt:/tmp# cd vmware-tools-distrib/ # no problem root@bt:/tmp# ./vmware-config-tools.pl # problem. File doesn't exist. ran ./vmware-install.pl instead.
Follow on-screen instructions as the installation proceeds. In every case, the answer was the default for my installs.
If this primer is helpful, I suspect you'll know that everything's working because of the sinking feeling you'll get that you're in over your head.
In contrast to dire but frustrated efforts to make progress with Backtrack 4, I fully intend to achieve at least elementary literacy with Backtrack 5. My plan is to start with nmap, which I have made pedestrian use of for about a year.
Here are the resources that I hope will cooperate with me so I'm not facing my own ignorance everytime I boot Backtrack 5: 
Nmap Cookbook: The Fat-free Guide to Network Scanning
Nmap Network Scanning: The Official Nmap Project Guide to Network Discovery and Security Scanning
BackTrack 4: Assuring Security by Penetration Testing
Penetration Tester's Open Source Toolkit, Vol. 2
However, given the quality of Backtrack's docs, it would be foolish not to give them the priority.
If there's a better way to make independent progress with Backtrack, please let us know at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .
