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This is it! After many months of effort from the Remote Exploit Dev team, BackTrack 4 Beta is ready and available at our Shmoo booth. 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-kde3is good, “apt-get install kateis 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“.
  • 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.

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