BackTrack is Live distribution for penetration and security tests. This is how its developers describe it. But there are plenty of tools, utilities, programs behind this brief description. Let’s dig into.

This distribution started from the merge of two ones: WHAX (or Whoppix) and Auditor Security Collection (the swiss army knife for security assessments). The latest stable version (BackTrack 3) contains more than 300 tools (including such monsters as wireshark, nmap, hping and others) which will be appreciated by every security professional. All tools are categorized into:

1. Information gathering
2. Network Mapping
3. Vulnerability Identification
4. Penetration
5. Privilage Escalation
6. Maintaining Access
7. Covering Tracks
8. Radio Network Analysis (Wi-Fi and Bluetooth)
9. VoIP and Telephony Analysis
10. Digital Forensics
11. Reverse Engineering

The full list of tools with descriptions you can find at official BackTrack wiki, screenshots and documentation are here.

Download Now: CD Image, USB Image. More?

P.S. Linus “almost Santa” Torvalds’ announcement is definitely worth reading:

Listen to the cheerful grinding of your harddisk as you reboot into an all-new kernel – and I’m sure that if your computer could smile, it would have a big silly grin on its non-existent face. So as you sit there in your basement, give your computer the holiday cheer too.

2. Top 10 Coolest Open Source Applications in 2008. Well, good reading in New Year Eve.

3. Bootable FSF membership cards: USB flash drive comes with pre-installed gNewSense 2.1.

4. Sabayon Linux 4.0 is realeased (smart Gentoo based distro): 25% boot speed gain, 8500 applications, ext4, KDE 4.1.3, Gnome 2.24.2, OpenOffice.org 3.0, Firefox 3.0 and more…

5. Pidgin 2.5.3 is out. Best GTK based instant messenger is ready for downloading. Changelog.

What is .docx actually? It’s Microsoft’s file format representing word processor documents and named OpenXML (as an attempt to create open and free international standard). Today .docx is default format for Microsoft’s word processor Word.

There are myriads of online converters between OpenXML and OpenOffice formats including .docx, .xlsx, .odt and many etc but sometimes it’s much more better to just open received .docx file in Linux offline (if there is temporarily no Internet connection or for security/private reasons etc).

So, just download the following package to certain directory like /usr/src, here are the commands to do it:

1. cd /usr/src
2. sudo wget http://blog.mypapit.net/imej/odf_filter.tar.bz2

The next step is to unpack the contents of the archive (.tar.bz2 is definitely well compressed file) and copy 3 files to OpenOffice’s system directories:

3. sudo tar -xvjf odf_filter.tar.bz2
4. sudo cp OdfConverter /usr/lib/openoffice/program/
5. sudo cp MOOXTypeDetection.xcu /usr/lib/openoffice/share/registry/modules/org/openoffice/TypeDetection/Types/
6. sudo cp MOOXFilter_cpp.xcu /usr/lib/openoffice/share/registry/modules/org/openoffice/TypeDetection/Filter/

As you can see from picture below now it’s possible to natively open .docx files in openoffice under Linux. Of course such “native” support may imply some artefacts in opened files due to file formats incompatibility so it’s also a good option to ask your friends to convert .docs into .pdf before sending you

P.S. Thanks to guys from mypapit.

P.S. Here are several online converters .doc(x) <-> .odf <-> .pdf:

1. ZAMZAR (possibly the best converter), 2. http://docx-converter.com/.

1. Hats off to Linux!. Intel and Netscape have announced investments in a small company developing the Linux operating system (RedHat).
2. Apache 1.3.2 is released. Upgrade now!
3. Microsoft questions Linux’s free model. Rich Gray, intellectual property attorney, thinks that the Linux model may not last.
4. MCI WorldCom Exec On Linux: Not So Fast. Uunet has not yet decided whether to deploy Linux.
5. Caldera announces partnership with Sybase.
   

   Caldera has made two announcements today: They will be shipping Sybase with their next release of OpenLinux, and OpenLinux 1.3 will be out on September 28th 1998.

6. Interview: Linux creator Linus Torvalds (in Real Audio).

1. Canonical Store is to sell multimedia codecs for Ubuntu. Codecs are developed by Fluendo and Cyberlink. It is still possible to do sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras and get that staff installed…
2. In A comparative look at compact sysadmin distributions article Cory Buford shares the observations he got during review of several portable (not more 210 Mb) Linux distros which may be helpful to handle “minor catastrophes”. BTW I prefer RIPLinuX
3. T-Mobile, Google and HTC announce that first phone based on Android platform will be out next week (23th of September 2008).
4. Google is going to launch its own “computer navy” (sea floating data centres). Now jokes – rumors.
5. Codeweavers company has adapted Google Chrome browser for Linux and Mac platform.
6. Mozilla asks to display firefox EULA in Ubuntu 8.10. Some people are really disturbed about that.
7. XFCE 4.6 first alpha is out for public testing.

And we just launched Linux and Open Source News aggregator at Linux Screw, so you are welcome to set it your homepage