BackTrack – a journey back to Slackware

2008 January 26
by rumytaulu

Ubuntu – Gutsy Gibbon (Installed it on Dec 11th 1007) was too easy and I didn’t like it. It made me look like some kind of dummy who didn’t know what to do.

So this is what I did (and I suggest anyone with guts to do so).

(1) I grabbed a fresh copy of BackTrack 3 Beta, the one which can be installed on USB stick, converted it to an iso file (with some tweak on its make_iso file) and burned it on DVD.

(2) Put the DVD on my toshiba laptop and fired it up

login : root

password : toor

(3) Formatted my 15Gigs Ubuntu / partition and my 200Megs /boot partition (but sane enough to leave my 65Gigs /home unformatted) ^__^

# mkfs.ext3 /dev/sda1

# mkfs.ext3 /dev/sda2

# mkfs.ext3 /dev/sda3

# mkswap /dev/sda3

(4) Mounted the / partition to /mnt/bt3

# mkdir /mnt/bt3

# mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/bt3

(5) Started the BackTrack GUI

# xconf

# startx

(6) And dumped BT3 to /mnt/bt3 via its KDE menu

I played a lot with Slackware before and thought that a little tweak could turn this Slackware derivative distro (Backtrack was build from Slax distro, which was build from Slackware) near to the original Slackware again – not just a live distro which can only be run from CD/DVD/USB – kudos for the BackTrack team who provided a way to dump this cool pentest distro to the harddrive


5 Responses leave one →
  1. 2008 January 26

    Well, Linux MUST be user friendly and easy to use to get much broader users. I myself like hacks on linux, compile it myself and even have my own distro with compiled from scratch (based on linuxfromscratch.org).

    I’m boring because it took all my effort, my time, my money etc. And all we need is productivity, so the “easy to use” distro comes out. Ubuntu is the one and my primary distro since Warty relased.

  2. 2008 January 26
    rumytaulu permalink

    Agree with that! – that’s why I said “anyone with guts” (no offense) and yeah … sometimes it takes effort, time and money … that’s the challange – something that some of us search for ;) – don’t get me wrong I teach Linux here in Manado and I used Ubuntu for the beginner class and Slackware for the advanced one.

  3. 2008 January 29
    liviu permalink

    Hey, just a question. How did you convert the usb edition to an iso (for DVD)?

  4. 2008 February 2
    rumytaulu permalink

    *Assuming you use windows,

    1. cd \bt3b141207\BT3
    2. edit make_iso.bat
    3. change slax to BT3

    slax\tools\WIN\mkisofs.exe @slax\tools\WIN\config -o “%1″ -A “%CDLABEL%” -V “%CDLABEL%” .

    change it so will look like this (note: no CR/newline):

    BT3\tools\WIN\mkisofs.exe @BT3\tools\WIN\config -o “%1″ -A “%CDLABEL%” -V “%CDLABEL%” .

    4. execute make_iso.bat and you’ll get your own DVD iso

  5. 2008 March 1
    Ray permalink

    Had to wait forever when I tested Backtrack on CD a few years ago. :(

    Can’t wait to try the pendrive release now. It’s faster, isn’t it? :D

    PS: Yeah. Ubuntu causes frustration. U always need to apt-get when u need simple readily-available-on-Slackware-or-Fedora packages. -_-”

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