Re: VMWare and which linux distro?

["Nathan R. Valentine" <nathan () nathanvalentine org>]

On Wed, 2004-01-07 at 16:15, Maxime Rousseau wrote:
> Hi List,
>
> I think a good portion of you guys use a VMWare-Linux setup when doing
> pen-test (for many reasons). The question i would like to ask is, which
> linux distribution works best for this specific purpose ? Obviously you
> dont need a distribution with many fency Xwin features and preferably


Well, how are you going to run the VMWare GUI to start up the guest
Windows OS without good X support? ;-p


> I am uncertain about which would work best in this particular scenario
> and i really cant think of anyone better then you guys to give me


Best distro questions are breeding grounds for flames, but here goes. My
favorite distro is Debian but I have been doing Linuxy stuff for a long
long time. From the above comments, I would guess that you are not as
familiar with Linux as you are with Windows. In that case, a distro with
better GUI-based tools for tweaking the system and installing extra
packages(Nessus, nmap, nbtscan, gcc, python, etc etc etc) and lots of
documentation is most likely going to work out better for you than
Debian. You will do well with any of the big names: SuSE, RedHat,
Mandrake. You might also do well with Knoppix or especially Knoppix-STD
using the knx-hdinstall script to dump the live CD to the VMWare guest
virtual disk. 


-- 
Nathan R. Valentine <nathan () nathanvalentine org>

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