As promised, we are releasing a BackTrack 4 R1 information security and penetration testing development build to the public for hardware testing. This is an unofficial build which is meant to help the BackTrack Dev team to assess any hardware incompatibilities with the new kernel we have put in place. This is NOT an official release, however we do need your input as to what works and what doesn’t. We are not interested in tracking broken applications as much as hearing how your hardware is fairing – particularly wireless cards, injection support, etc.

What’s Changed:

  • Updated all packages, manual update of aircrack-ng.
  • Updated to kernel 2.6.34-rc6
  • Known to work with broadcom wireless 4312/5.
  • No additional drivers installed other than stock kernel drivers.

Known Bugs:

  • ATH5K is semi functional – we added patched madwifi-ng drivers as backup.
  • VMWare tools does not play nice with the new kernel.
  • Only the first boot option is viable, the 800×600 initrd and forensics initrd have not been updated. Do not try to boot the ISO with those options.
PLEASE NOTE : We will be dedicating a SINGLE THREAD in the backtrack forums for hardware issue reports with the R1 release. Forum posts outside of this thread will be deleted.
The testing kernel has been updated in our development repositories. If you want to test it out, you can uncomment the appropriate line in sources.list, and then issue an apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade. We ask that you test our new kernel and post your hardware compatibility observations in our forums.

Download:

Download BackTrack R1 Dev here:
md5sum : ea30ac34e58b3cf9902c59baffc62aa7
http://www.offensive-security.com/backtrack/penetration-testing-information-security-distribution/