I have been emailed a few times concerning my first post about tweaking Backtrack. Seems like some people have had problems with installing Backtrack 2 final, because the instructions floating around usually only work with BT1 or BT2 beta. Before I get into that I would like to mention that if people have questions concerning a post, please post your question on the forum and not in a private email or pm. There are a number of reasons to post on this forum.  If you post, it helps the forum as far as activity goes.  If you just email me, all you get is my idea. If you post you could get several ideas from different members and there is a lot of talent here.

If you are finding it difficult to install BT2 to a hard drive or VMware, this is the most fool proof way and I have done this on 4 laptops from different manufactures with no problem whatsoever.

First boot to the BT2 cd and once past the login type  startx then hit enter. Hit enter after each of the following commands.
Type  fdisk /dev/sda
At the next prompt type  n  (this is for a new partition)
Then type p (this is for a primary partition)
Now type 1
Hit enter 4 times to get past the defaults and don’t worry about entering any values for the cylinders. This way you will use the entire dedicated space.
Type  w

Once that has been written type,  mke2fs /dev/sda1
Type,  mkdir /mnt/backtrack
Type  mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/backtrack/

Ok now its time to go to the Backtrack installer which is found in the KDE menu at the bottom corner. Look for BackTrack at the top of the menu and then go to Miscellaneous. There you will see the BackTrack installer. Once you have the gui up you will see 3 places to enter your settings. Leave the top box empty for the source. This is very important . Next box down enter /mnt/backtrack.  In final box to designate the placement of the MBR writes, /dev/sda.  Then choose the real 2700mb install.

Now begin the install and be patient. It always hangs at 80% for a long time and that’s normal. That’s were the largest part of the cd is being copied. 

I am sure you notice that no swap file as been created. If you want a swap file, do this after you have installed in this manner. Keeping your install simple is the key if you have a problematic install due to your chipset.   If you have a gig or more ram, I doubt you will notice much a performance difference anyway if you do decide to eliminate the swap, but if you are a linux purist you will definitely want to enable a swap file.

Another question was about the video drivers that work with BackTrack. As I mentioned in my first post , if you have an ATI or Nvidia video card  its easy, just go download the linux driver right from their sites. It will work fine.  On the other hand if you are using Intel graphics, your best bet is to use 915resolution. Just google that and you will find it easy enough.  Once you have it, just follow the install instructions in the readme.  After that and you have created the resolution for your display, which for many laptops its 1280 x 800 , reboot your computer. Now before you  “startx”, type your desire resolution. For me its 915resolution 38 1280 800.  After you hit enter type xconf and this will hopefully write it to xorg.conf file. Now type startx and you should boot to your new screen resolution every time you boot up.  If that doesn’t work, you will have to write your own start up script for 915resolution. Worst case is you have to type out your 915resolution each time you boot up before startx.

 Of course a good knowledge of working from the command line is essential and there are some operations that are only reliable from a terminal.   I know some hard core linux freaks look down on using the gui, but I don’t at all. If you are going to spend hours working with an OS why not make it visually appealing? In fact, BackTrack really has some nice options to download a large amount of first class desktops and you also can do some nice customizing of fonts and screens.  Actually I have my install prettier than windows xp, LOL! 

Loaded great for me, thanks