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Kali Linux, Successor of the BackTrack Penetration Testing Distro, Launched
mask.of.sanity writes "Kali, the sixth installment of the BackTrack operating system has been launched. The platform is a favorite of hackers and penetration testers and has been entirely rebuilt to become more secure, transparent and customizable. Metasploit too has been rebuilt to be more stable with an optional noob-friendly interface. Kali even works on ARM devices and comes ready to go for your Raspberry Pi."
The big new feature is that it's been repackaged as a flavor of Debian, instead of using their own custom packaging magic.
The last time I checked, Kali was some sort of VPN to tunnel IPX (NetWare protocol) over IP. It appears to have been popular when Warcraft II was around. Oh well, there are only so many names for things.
FFS stick with one name.
Isn't this the distro that went through WHAX, Whoppix, etc. before becoming BackTrack?
Pick one damn name and stick with it.
Penetration testing with a Raspberry pi, sounds like a movie to me.
Time to offend someone
One thing that I have never understood is why is Backtrack/Kali a distro in the first place. Why not just release a set of packages with a meta package to require the others if you chose deb, or rpm, if you want to run on Ubuntu/Debian/RH/Centos or as like a Slackware diskset with tag files if you go that way?
I can understand most users not wanted to plot the packages into their regular install they actively use. There are lots of tools that need setuid etc and specific versions of libraries you might not want around on the system for other reasons. Still if it was just a package set it would make it easy to install in a Linux container or chroot environment without having to run in a full VM. It would make it much easier to install a subset of the functionality if you have domain specific needs on your main install as well. At the same time it would make it no harder to install on a VM or dedicated portable, just install the distro than slap the packages on. Its not as if anyone doing anything useful with msf etc can't manage to do installpkg kali-*.tgz, or apt get kali or whatever.
Don't take the is post as knocking the project; I really mean it as just asking a question and stating some reasons why I think a different approach might make some sense. This is an amazingly well put together tool. I am sure there is a ton of effort that went in continues to into getting all those packages built and playing nice with each other. Lots of the code and build scripts etc for those tools are not exactly what you would ordinarily call release ready. Having tried to package some of them myself along the way I fully aware of this. I know the maintainers also have to put lots of effort into making sure they don't package anything that really is malicious too; which is no small task.
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"Can someone please explain to me why one would use this distro instead of just installing packages with Debian? I've never understood the appeal"
See the reply to a similar question further up.
The short answer is: because all the privileges and configs have been pre-set-up so everything just works. You would have to do an awful lot of diddling a standard *nix distro in order to do the same thing. This way, you just install. Somebody else has already done the (considerable amount of) work.