Pentoo Status Update

Normally I try really hard to avoid posting anything personal on the official blog.  Most of the users simply don't care what I and the rest of the development team had for breakfast (I had Naked Double Berry juice), however, once in a blue moon something entertaining enough happens that it is worth sharing. Today is the birthday of the majority of the active developers. No, it's not Pentoo's birthday, that would be Jun 22nd, no, today is both my birthday and Anton's.  Lots of things draw open source groups together, common interests and goals, desire to learn and help others, and apparently shared birthdays.  Truely the birthday paradox (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem) has been working overtime on this one, with only 3 active developers the odds of colliding birthdays is a bit astronomical.

Okay, I've blabbed about useless things for long enough, I bet you are all wondering wtf we are doing over here (too much cake, not enough code).  Despite Anton and I celebrating getting one year older, we have actually done a lot of work.  Some bugs have popped up in opencl and cuda which we are currently working out, however, for the most part, things are humming along very smoothly.  I expect RC2 to come out in May with updated cuda/opencl support and we are pushing hard on new features for the installer as well.

Stay tuned everyone, we are always working, even today while celebrating with cake ;-)

Thanks,
Zero_Chaos and the Pentoo Linux Team

PS> For once I'm not disabling comments so feel free to leave some personal notes, just keep bugs on the bug tracker where they belong please: https://code.google.com/p/pentoo/issues/list

Codename: Backtrack 6; Pentoo 2013.0 RC1.1 Release

NOT.  I just couldn't help myself.  By now I'm sure all of you have heard, BackTrack has been renamed to Kali and they are keeping everything tightly underwraps until their release sometime, no one will say when.  A lot of fuss has been going on that the Kali release is going to be March 9th (today), but since the Offensive Security guys swear that isn't true, I figured I'd give you all a treat to pass the many weeks of waiting for a functional Kali release.

Behold, Pentoo 2013.0 RC1.1 !

Jam packed with 3.7.5 kernel (pax hardened for 64 bit users) and built with a fully hardened toolchain (did someone say wireshark exploit?).  Time may have been passing, but we here at Pentoo have been anything but idle (you can check the svn history).  As usual, we have the latest tools and toys for all the good little pen-testers.  I simply couldn't list them all if I tried, so I'm not going to try.  Everything has its usual amount of spit and polish on it, except the layers seem to be building up.  This release comes with a shiny new installer with 200% more works!  Automatic and manual modes for normal partitioning and booting now work properly, and the installer is very fast (you know, as fast as we can copy all that data to your hard drive).

I could probably keep running my mouth but I know what you all want, the download link.  This time we are going to use the official download site at http://www.pentoo.ch/download/ .  You may notice a few exciting things related to this.  First and foremost, torrents are back.  I am now auto-generating a torrent file for every release and registering it with a tracker (kindly provided by Bitweasil of Cryptohaze fame) so you can all stop crying about downloading from the webserver I host on my 3g cell phone.  For those of you who cannot use a torrent, the normal download is still available, plus some brand new (and old) mirrors are being activated for use.  Syncing is going on as we speak (and our mirror over at Inerail is already seeding the torrent) and once mirrors are ready to go I'll add them to the download page and they will be available for future releases as well.

We have some really big plans for you all in the near future, so download Pentoo, hack all the things, report all the bugs, and together we are going to have an awesome 2013.  Thanks for your support, and have fun.

Just in case you actually read all that, here is the download link again as a reward for making it through.
http://www.pentoo.ch/download/

UPDATE: The main webserver is occasionally  unable to handle the load but our friends at Switch and Inerail have their mirrors up and running hosting the isos and the torrent files, get it while it's hot!

http://mirror.switch.ch/ftp/mirror/pentoo/
ftp://mirror.switch.ch/mirror/pentoo/

http://pentoo.east.us.mirror.inerail.net/
ftp://pentoo.east.us.mirror.inerail.net/pentoo/
http://pentoo.west.us.mirror.inerail.net/
ftp://pentoo.west.us.mirror.inerail.net/pentoo/

Be sure to get the 2013.0 RC1.1 release...it seems everyone else is.

Zero_Chaos and the Pentoo Linux Team

Pentoo Beta3 Release...mostly

Today during my presentation at BesidesDE we are releasing the 64 bit version of Beta3.  I couldn't be happier with this release, but today is a little bittersweet for me. As one giant ball of awesome, the Pentoo Linux team really isn't accustomed to failure, but every single 32 bit build I've done has resulted in complete failure.

Issues have ranged from horrifying and unexplained build failures, to building perfectly but being completely unbootable, through booting at 1983 speeds and every command simply returning "segfault".

That said, for those of you that don't have computers from 2003 will LOVE the updates in beta3.  The installer has been reworked so that it, ahem, works.  Additionally a number of tweaks to improve updating and system customization have been made. We have shiny new wifi drivers, shiny new video card drivers, and all your favorite password crackers updated and ready to rock out.

I've already begun picking up the pieces of my shattered 32 bit build and I promise all you people who got suckered into buying eeepcs that I have not given up.  Pentoo Linux does work fine on 32 bit (we have a number of users doing it now) but there is something wrong with the building of the iso that I will have to work out.

We at Pentoo Linux are very proud of this work, we hope that you enjoy using it as much as we did making it.

"The world belongs to those
who stand out from the rows
of wayward and misguided silent souls
History is shamed
By people laying blame
To everyone who doesn't feel the same"

Main site:
http://dev.pentoo.ch/~zero/isos/

Mirror:
http://grp.aircrack-ng.org/

Thanks,
Zero_Chaos and the Pentoo Linux Team

Update on Beta3

As many of you know I promised a new beta, with both 32 and 64 bit versions, in time for Bsides Delaware.  For those of you not in the know, that conference starts on Friday this week.  Well, I have good news and bad news.  I've spent the last few months very busy trying to kick out some special things to improve beta2 enough to call it beta3.

The first thing I realized that to accomplish anything worth doing, I was going to have to compile on something a little faster than my i5 laptop.  So, I spoke to a few friends about options, and finally settled on a a set of specs that DigitalPsyko wrote up for me.

After roughing out the plans for the computer I had to take a quick break and shoot down to Louisville Kentucky for Derbycon 2012.  If you have never been, it truly is the best conference ever and worth every bit of your time...and not just because they are silly enough to let me talk about whatever I want to.

This year I spoke about how the hacker community needs to get off their asses and contribute instead of just leaching, you can watch here and share with your favorite people who are always working on cool stuff and not sharing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3bpN9eHe5o

After Derbycon finished, I got home and spent a few $$'s to build this:

The blue led fans came with the case and have been removed for better anti-gamer styling.

So once I had a cool little build box I started getting to work, only to find the incredibly crappy OCZ Revodrive PCI-e SSD failed. I've since replaced it twice and still have no working ssd for the box. Don't buy SSDs from OCZ, Newegg won't even refund my money because OCZ is such garbage they refuse to do anything at all now. Fortunately 64GB of RAM means I can put enough things in RAM that the old hdd I'm running off of for now.  A little embarassing to build a 32 core box and drop a random crappy spare 250GB hdd in it, but at least it got me building.

It's been a few weeks now with the new box, and let's just saying being able to build this many parallel processes means not only is it way faster to build, it's also way faster to fail... and boy how does it fail quickly.  So many parallel make bugs found, and bad dependencies, I've even managed to find a few filesystem bugs.

The good news is that this morning I tested a very functional amd64 build that I was going to call beta3, the bad news is that the corresponding x86 build couldn't even boot. In a day or two hopefully I'll resolve the issue with the 32 bit build and drop beta3 on all of you.  Until then enjoy my Derbycon 2.0 talk, and wish me luck.

Thanks,
Zero_Chaos

PS> Please don't try to comment on the blog, I really don't read it much.  We have a bug tracker and IRC where I and the rest of the team are very responsive.

Pentoo 2012.0 Beta2

It's my favorite time of year again, the really short lul between Defcon and Derbycon.  I've used my freetime to polish up all the bug reports from our Defcon Beta release and kick out a shiny new release. Many surprises await you, but I'm not building up a bugfix beta more than I already have.

New things: default hardened setup, torrent download

http://dev.pentoo.ch/~zero/isos/pentoo-x86_64-2012.0_beta2.torrent

Live to Hack, Hack to Live.  If my dedication isn't obvious, today is my Anniversary but here I am uploading betas, etc ;-)

You will not find a team of volunteers more dedicated than ours, so test the release and submit bugs so we can make it even better for you.

Bug Tracker:
https://code.google.com/p/pentoo/issues/list

Thanks,
Zero_Chaos and the Pentoo Team

Pentoo 2012.0 Defcon Beta

We are really doing it this time folks, we are really making a release.  Thanks to my whole team we are rocking brand new and shiny everything.

This beta was made in haste, during defcon, while holding my laptop and walking around the con while it was compiling.  I can't believe the poor thing didn't melt in the Vegas afternoon sun.

I'm not going to say much here, except please try it.  Download the iso, and don't waste your time telling us we are awesome (we already know that) or that we suck (go back to ubuntu).  Instead, if you are going to spend some time writing us an email, please tell us what is missing, and what is completely worthless to you.  we have included as many tools as possible in this release for all kinds of pen-testing, but I'm sure I've missed a few, and left a few old/crappy ones in and we need YOUR input to make Pentoo better.

No more putting off for tomorrow what you can hack today, begin the revolution:

http://dev.pentoo.ch/~zero/isos

-Zero_Chaos and the Pentoo Team

Arise from the ashes

We are still here folks, I know it's hard to believe.  There has been a lot of life keeping us busy, Grimmlin is now a proud husband and father (in that order and more than 9 months apart), and I am flying ~200 times a year for work. Many things have changed, we moved our bug tracker and svn (I still hate git) from pentoo.ch to googlecode, and we have significantly tightened our integration into gentoo.  About 6 weeks ago I was officially welcomed into the development team for Gentoo Linux, so my time has been evenly split between pushing critical packages and fixes up to Gentoo, and building live cds for development testing. Given the fact that I have never done anything like this, it has been a rough ride, especially since I've been building on my i5 laptop ;-) At HOPE I ran my mouth a little bit, and suggested I would have a public beta available for Defcon, which currently looks like it simply isn't going to happen.  Been a little too busy with fun things and not so fun things and just plain stuck on a few bugs which prevent the build from going properly.  None of these problems are major, and as such please stay tuned after Defcon.  Gentoo has promised a new release of a few things I need around July 30th so I should be able to kick out a nice public beta some time in August.

Just as a teaser, here are things which are already complete:

1.)New "pentoo" profiles which allow you to use hardened or not at your choice (who wants to be soft?)
2.)Full gpu cracking support for both cuda and opencl on both amd/ati and nvidia hardware including but not limited to pyrit, johntheripper, oclhashcat-plus, oclhashcat-lite
3.)Shiny 3.4.2 kernel (hardened or not)
4.)Full support for the ubertooth hardware (also added to kismet and wireshark)
5.)New radio category for sdr hacking for things like the rtl-sdr and Ettus USRP devices.
6.) 64 bit version (32 bit is a low priority until after the beta starts, sorry if your hardware is that old/crappy)

Things which are planned in a short order:

1.) Full arm support
2.)Openbts, for when hacking wifi just isn't cool enough to get the girl ;-)

Again, these are the short lists, the real changelog and planned features are mostly hiding in our >3000 commits in svn.  This will be a gem folks, if you have ever wanted a no-nonsense pen-testing distribution, this will be it.  Our aim is to be the rulers of this planet, even if only in our own minds.

See you soon, we will be talking again when we rock your work.

Sincerely,
Zero_Chaos and the entire Pentoo team

PS> I'm hiding out in Vegas in the Wireless Village at Defcon XX so stop by and let me know what's on your mind.