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Tuesday, April 8, 2008

Experience with BackTrack 3(Linux)

Using linux (BackTrack) is proving to be a real learning expereince. I always wanted to use Linux instead of Windows as my  primary OS. I tried shifting to linux many times in the past. tried using Xandros, Ubuntu, Red Hat and some more flavours. but couldnt get anything done with them. Not that they were particularly bad. Main reason was lack of a relable internet connection.
Nowadas with a good net connection, anytime am stuck with something I just search it on any search engine (Google mostly) and more often than not I have the solution within miniutes.
I was unable to do so earlier without internet.
Nowadays almost every Linux distro based on ny platform supports almost every hardware straight out of the box, but still many times you need to dowload some file  to make something work.
In my case, I havent been able to use my RTL8139 chpset NIC work :-|
Not that I particularly need it. Onboard card works well without a hitch..but still I'd like  it to work,. Just for the sake of challange

:D

I've downloaded and successfully installed many good software,
list includes
VMware (server and player , both free)
Opera Browser
Some misc system software including Wine, sqlite3, postgres and many more.
Currently downloading OpenOffice. I hope it'll install fine without  givingmuch trouble now
Finally learnt to use multiple desktop option.
Still some stuff proves o be quite difficult

Games for one. No windows game will work  here.
Sometimes, some games seem to  work with Wine, but they crash soon. Updating the software to a newer version was of  no help.

Then  tried installing Cedega, but waas put off by their ridiculous  5 Euro per month subscription fee. Thats too much to pay  in any case.
Then I tried installing the free version, Cedega CVS. After going through numerous guides, installing dozens of packages am still unable to run any game.

To top that, BackTrack lacks support for multi-channel sound.

Enquiring about these issues in BT forum gives response, "This is a pen-testing distro. Not meant for games, music etc" :|
Well., I can understand that, but even with a pen test distro, a person sometimes will really like to use it as his/her primary OS.  This point aparently escaped the notice of the BT people.
Not much use of complaiing. They'vce made and released this excellent OS for free afterall.

My windows installation still stays..for games only.  :\

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