LINUX- AN INTRODUCTION TO THE VARIOUS FLAVOURS Part-2

PART 2 will focus in the versions suitable for advanced user

In the 1st part of the post I made an introduction with LINUX for beginners as well as distros suitable for new user and as well as those which can be used in everyday life as easily as Windows as well as other consumer operating systems. This time we will focus more on the advanced versions of LINUX suitably for geeks, programmers as well as for hackers. I will start with Slackware which is my favourite and use it every day.

1)   SLACKWARE

Well the golden words here would be it’s the most UNIX like distribution ever, and one of the earliest LINUX distributions to be built upon the LINUX Kernel. The Official Release of Slackware Linux was by Patrick Volkerding. And saw its 1^st beta release in April  1993. Slackware is a programmer’s heaven; it includes almost all compilers and development environment we could wish for. Say it C, C++ and java, pearl. It also includes networking utilities, Web server and almost everything you will ever need straigt out of the box. Slackware gives us the option of many desktop environments as well as a stripped down version for implementation as a server.

"THIS IS THE DISTRIBUTION FOR PROGRAMMERS BY PROGRAMMER"

More information and reference for advanced operations can be found in this free pdf link

ftp://ftp.slackbook.org/pub/slackbook/slackbook-2.0.pdf

Download SLACKWARE here http://www.slackware.com/getslack/

 

2)   BACKTRACK

It’s the security and penetration testers’ heaven. It originated from the merger of two former distributions.

1) WHAX a Slak based distribution developed by Mati Aharoni, an Israeli security consultant.

2) AUDITOR SECURITY COLLECTION: Knoppix based cd developed by Max Moser which included over 300 tools for troubleshooting, network and systems-fortifying.

Backtrack provide a huge collection of tools ranging from port scanners, password cracker to all essential tools which has made it important enough to be used by major companies as standard penetration toolkit, security and digital forensics.The first real Backtrack release was made public in the early 2007. Its a KDE based desktop.An important thing to note is that the tools present are extremely useful as well might work against if not used with the right amount of respect skill and knowledge. So I won’t be wrong to say that this is an advance level and probably a special distribution only and not to be used as a regular distribution as such.

                                                       

                                                RESPECT IT !!

Download BACKTRACK here http://www.backtrack-linux.org/downloads/