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Friday, November 7, 2008

BackTrack 3

I installed BackTrack 3 on my PC at work. Installing it in a dual boot configuration along with XP proved to be a nightmare. Messed up my XP partition once and was unable to get dual boot working properly. It'd work fine for 2-3 days and then mess up.  At first it was LILO giving crazy errors and garbled text, so I  followed instructions posted by GoodGirl in Remote Exploit forums and installed GRUB.I don't know if it really worked for people who posted there thanking her, but that tutorial has many errors.
 Using BackTrack 3 hasn't proved to be a good experience either. It has quite a few bugs, or maybe its just the under powered PC I have here (256MB RAM only). My list of annoyances:
1) Linux is fast. Much faster than Windows with little lag times and programs almost never  hanging up. But BT 3 is an exception. Its very slow, running 2-3 programs simultaneously is sure way to slow down or crash everything. I've installed this OS 2 times with different images. (USB one)
2)  We have a proxy here.  I tried my best but was unable to get any program except browsers and chat clients to use the proxy for accessing external networks. Updating doesn't work either. I'm unable to find a  proxy setting for system like there is one for Windows services.  Wise guys at RE forums had their own ethicaly White Hat views on this.
3) Compiz Fusion is a complete dud. Themes don't work properly. Not to mention you can't download new themes due to proxy restriction. Maybe its due to low RAM.
4) Mouse has gone crazy. It cannot differentiate between single and double clicks. I tried almost everything in Mouse settings, increasing/decreasing sentivity, lag time, changing themes. But its stuck. Sometimes my clicks get recognised as single at other times they are double. You can guess the results. Same mouse works fine in XP.
5) GUI installation has been removed. Now its back to command line installation. You can copy the installation script,  bt3.kmdr file from older distros for graphical intall though. Here is the file. Some senior members say that they prefer people to use thumbdrives for running BT 3. Why'd anybody use thumbdrives if they can install on HDD except in rare cases?
BT 3 Beta and even XP are a lot better than this (except for proxy). I'm still using BT 3 Beta on my home PC. No use taking chances with all that data there.

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