Well, it's that fabulous time of year again. The time where we all have a few days in a row off work so we can concentrate on the things we really care about, like spending time with family. But after about an hour we all get pretty tired of that and get to work on Pentoo :-)
This year, the holiday has been pretty good to us over here at Pentoo and we have a late New Years gift to all our fans, Pentoo 2015 RC3.7. You can get it at the usual place: http://www.pentoo.ch/download
This RC is the followup to the fixes and improvements in RC3.6 from BsidesDE, plus some other exciting stuff. First of all, the boot menu has a new "verify" option which will confirm that the iso files have not been corrupted by unetbootin or a bad thumb drive. I know checking md5sums yourself is annoying, plus it's impossible to verify after you install to a thumb drive, so now you can do it quickly on boot, automatically! The side effect to this is that we find that things like unetbootin sometimes make unexpected changes, and you may need to use the second (no verify) boot option to actually run Pentoo. Please report issues to the issue tracker so we can find out what is changing files, and why, I'd really like to find out why sometimes unetbootin works flawlessly, and sometimes it doesn't.
Additionally, the initramfs has been enhanced with the ability to use unetbootin's "Space used to preserve files across reboots" feature which is labeled "ubuntu only". Well, I guess that should say "Ubuntu and Pentoo" only. Not like changes saving is a new feature, but now you can use the changes saving from unetbootin as well.
Last update to the boot code was an update to syslinux 5 from syslinux 4. It seems most linux distros have updated to syslinux 5 now, so this keeps unetbootin working on those distros (because unetbootin reinstalls its version of the bootloader). Unfortunately, this means if you have a unetbootin version which still uses syslinux4 (windows seems to have this issue) you can't make a Pentoo usb stick with unetbootin. Fortunately, you can actually boot Pentoo in a vm and make a usb stick with unetbootin from there, proof that Pentoo is the solution to all of your problems ;-)
In addition to all the boot loader changes and the standard updates, we have switched metasploit live to using ruby 2.1. This change was not only important because ruby 1.9 support is ending soon, but because it was a near 600% increase in speed. Remember waiting 30+ seconds for msfconsole to load? Well, those days are gone.
We hope you enjoy using Pentoo as much as we do. Happy Holidays, and good luck in the Wireless CTF at Shmoocon!
-Zero_Chaos on behalf of the Pentoo Team and their supportive families who let them hack for the holidays
Issue Tracker: https://code.google.com/p/pentoo/issues/list
WCTF: http://wctf.us/
