Saturday, March 09, 2013

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