BackTrack 4 Beta - Shmoo release

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-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.
  

I will be adding items to this list as relevant.

So far we have been receiving outstanding feedback as far as hardware support is concerned. We are looking forward to hearing people's feedback in Shmoo. Rock on!