My First ISO

[F-Zero_Sam]

Hey everyone, this is my first post.

Unfortunately, I know next to nothing about Kali or its BackTrack predecessor. I just purchased a book called "Defense Against the Black Arts", by Jesse Varsalone and Matthew McFadden. The book is fairly new (released in September 2011), but in the beginning, it says that BackTrack 4 Beta and BackTrack 3 are ideal for performing the exercises the book. So I went to www.livecdlist.com to download BackTrack 5, only to find that it can't be downloaded anymore, and is obsolete.

I've already read in Kali documentation that it's dangerous for users who aren't familiar with Linux to use Kali, but how dangerous? How vastly different is it from BackTrack? The book looks awesome, and I'd hate to have to discard the book for this reason. What should I do?

[humima]

I have been using Ubuntu for awhile now, and really want to learn how to code, and what not so a friend said use kali, but I didnt want to do it on my main computer if you have a back up I would do that, as I am right now.

[sark_89]

Hi,
Don't let it put you off when it says that it can be dangerous for a non Linux user to use Kali. Normally people tend to say its dangerous because you are always running as root i.e. the super user. To me thats great because then I don;t have to mess about typing sudo all the ****** time! The first Linux distro that I used a lot was backtrack. I've toyed around with Ubuntu but once installed I always thought, 'Right now what do I do with it?' where as with Kali there's loads of tools to sit and play with. I wouldn't recommend installing Kali on a computer and use it as your soul OS. Run it in a virtual machine or on another standalone computer. I run mine on a IBM T60 laptop and not on my main PC or anything else. When I first started to play with BackTrack I found myself fudging it all up and ended up reinstalling the **** thing and then having to reinstall all the other bits and pieces I had downloaded and installed. So my advice to you would be to read through that book and use it as a good bit of foundation knowledge. I've found Kali a lot easier and more forgiving to use than Back Track. I would strongly recommend you install it on a old machine or in a virtual machine so if you play with it and muck it up then its not the end of the world to reinstall it and start afresh. I'd even go so far to say that's the best thing to do because its a good exercise to do to learn the OS and Linux as a whole. I hope that's helped! Good luck with it all!!! Oh and there are some good books about Kali also scan through these forums and YouTube for tutorials etc.