BackTrack 5 released [LWN.net]

BackTrack 5 - a distribution oriented around security research and penetration testing, has been released. "Based on Ubuntu Lucid LTS. Kernel 2.6.38, patched with all relevant wireless injection patches. Fully open source and GPL compliant. Head down to our downloads page to get your copy now!" (LWN reviewed the previous BackTrack release last year).

BackTrack 5 released

Posted May 11, 2011 8:24 UTC (Wed) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link] (1 responses)

Does anyone know what are the most common reasons for injection patches not to be upstreamed? Code too dirty? No one making the effort to push them? General policy of rejecting potentially "evil" tools? Others?

BackTrack 5 released

Posted May 11, 2011 8:36 UTC (Wed) by johill (subscriber, #25196) [Link]

I don't even know what they are, maybe that's saying something. A few patches were posted and rejected for various reasons; some of them even broke regular functionality and were rejected due to that. If these aren't changed (and if they are, why weren't they resubmitted?), I wouldn't recommend using the resulting kernel for anything but.

BackTrack 5 released

Posted May 11, 2011 9:23 UTC (Wed) by djrom (guest, #26074) [Link] (2 responses)

Backtrack isn't Open Source! Sure it is using FOSS, but I've spent a lot of time trying to find where their custom packages sources can be found, and fact is that it doesn't seem to be public, which in my opinion is conflicting with this assertion.

I'd like to be wrong though, and if someone has been luckiest and found this sources, I'd be glad to see the pointer.

Really free?

Posted May 11, 2011 11:40 UTC (Wed) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link]

Hmmm. That's worrying.

When they say "Fully open source and GPL compliant", I assumed they meant that it was "Fully open source [i.e. free software]" and that they were complying with the GPL, but the other interpretation is that they just claim that their software is fully compatible with other packages that are "open source and GPL".

Their FAQ doesn't seem to say anything about free software or licences.

Of course, truly free distros are rarer than most people think. FSF maintains a list:
http://www.gnu.org/distros/free-distros.html

BackTrack 5 released

Posted May 11, 2011 14:35 UTC (Wed) by ctg (guest, #3459) [Link]

A bit of a google shows this:

http://www.backtrack-linux.org/backtrack/backtrack-5-release-tool-suggestions/

Perhaps most importantly BackTrack 5 revolution will be our first release to include full source code in its repositories. This is a big thing for us, as it officially joins us to the open-source community and clears up any licensing issues which were present in BackTrack 4.