Fort Worth Linux Users Group Discussion Board

Hello All, just joined up. I am a ten year Microsoft, Cisco admin, 0 time Linux. The big man gave me a copy of Backtrack 4 and said "learn this". I installed ok on a new drive on my laptop. It did not take long to realized I know zero Linux. I wonder if you guys can point me in the right direction on where to start. I have Ubuntu, "Beginning Ubuntu Linux" (Thomas & Channelle 4th.) and a spare machine. I am not above "Linux for Dummies" if that is a better way. Thanks, Dan

Best bet is to do what you are already doing. Grab a book and jump in. The more to use it and tinker with it, the faster you will learn. Ubuntu is a good distribution to start with. There are plenty of IRC channels for the various distributions.

If you are looking for audio to listen to on the way to work or such, check out the Linux Reality podcast archives. Some of it is a little dated, but most of the basic information still holds up.

Feel free to ask if you have any questions.

You can try this as well....Don't be afraid to ask questions...and Welcome Aboard! There are many that are Win Admins that are learning as we go (Like me!)

http://www.ubuntupocketguide.com/index_main.html

Try here:
http://www.backtrack-linux.org/forums/b ... hread.html

Bum around those forums and you will find plenty of information. One thing to keep in mind is that Backtrack is very specialized for a specfic purpose. Just a warning that everything may not line up exactly with some of the books that cover a generic/broad view of Linux. However, everything you dig up on the backtrack-forums for BT4 will.

Also, post back anything cool that you find! There are a lot of goodies in BT4 and I am certain that you will uncover things that others on this forum don't know.

Good luck! BT4 is a lot of fun if you are a security guy.

~Stack~

Come on down to the meeting.

Have a beer at $1.50.

Mingle with nerds and talk tech.



Davemon

Dan, I have one word of advice for you: Slackware

I used to tell people that Slackware was a great distribution for learning how everything is put together, b/c you had to configure everything to get it to work. These days, a lot more of it works out of the box. That said, if you want anything that's not in the mainline distro, you get to learn about slackbuilds.org or compile it yourself (makepkg is your friend).

If I remember correctly, Backtrack is based on Slax, a liveCD distro based on Slackware. So it would probably be a good idea to learn it anyway.

I don't mean to scare you off of Slackware. I learned *nix on that and FreeBSD back in the mid 1990s, and I still run Slackware today. But my wife's netbook runs Kubuntu.

I am not sure if your main machine is a laptop or not, but if it is, I would suggest you install virtualbox. Check it out here -> http://www.virtualbox.org/ Also make sure you have about 10GB free on your hard drive, because your going to want to install backtrack 4 a virtual drive if you want to get the most out it because running the system from the cd does not save all the changes you make to the system, which becomes important if you want to use metasploit. I recently just installed back track to my system and have collected a few helpful links along the way.

http://g0tmi1k.blip.tv/file/3129332 (Video showing how to install BT4 and running various updates *might want to mute if you don't like techno music*)
http://www.offensive-security.com/ (Kind of the official BT linux support site)
http://www.backtrack-linux.org/forums/b ... track.html (how to start networking)
http://www.pawprint.net/designresources ... verter.php (linux netmasking when you start using nmap)
http://uploads.blip.tv/file/576639 (why you need to learn linux/*nix - shows the power of bt)
http://forums.remote-exploit.org/newbie ... -read.html (If you decide to go the virtual machine route.)

...oh to the person who said BT is based off of slack, Im pretty sure that is incorrect, and that BT4 is built around Debian.

cheers