I am sure just about everyone reading this forum is familiar with the live CD BackTrack. If not you better hurry up and download!  Do I use it on a real pentest? Yes actually, but not always.  Don’t get me wrong, I love BackTrack and I use it when I am feeling lazy and in a hurry.  I often start a pentest with it. If  I cant make a breach, I go to my combination of  Linux and XP.  What version of Linux? Right now I am playing with Ubuntu and its seems great so far.  LOL, I hope you see I am being honest and not trying to be elite or l33t or whatever. Most hackers would never admit to using anything popular. Hey, I don’t care as long as it gets the job done! Hey, but I digress.

   I have been playing with BackTrack before it was called BackTrack. Remember Whax?  BackTrack was supposed to be a combination of Auditor and Whax, but I feel its mostly Whax.  I have to admit I wish we still had Auditor updated, but oh well. 

  The best performance form BackTrack is realized from a full hard drive install.  No question about that. If I was an evil hacker I would run it as a live CD so as not to leave forensic evidence, but in my pentest I actually like having that. You never know when you must support your data! Interesting, the creators of BackTrack like to run it from a hard drive install also. So I guess I am in good company.

  I would also suggest making a swap file. I do that mostly out of tradition but to be very honest, I have a lot of ram and I don’t seem to notice much of a difference.  Jeeze, we computer geeks measure our manhood with the amount of ram, LOL!

 If you use BackTrack a lot, I would advise downloading a video driver. It makes a big difference in your viewing and if you are spending a lot of time working with this as a pentest, why not be comfortable? If you are using an ATI card, just go to their site and download the driver and install. Don’t worry about that ati.lzm file. The regular ATI linux download works fine. 

  So those are the 3 things to do.  Install it on the hard drive, set a swap file (depending on your ram) and get a video driver.   Hey, but don’t get too hooked on it, there are many reasons to also know Linux and Backtrack doesn’t really support being as creative as a regular Linux distro.