I've been doing some testing of wifi and stuff around work and around the house and I'm looking for recommendations for the best distro to accomplish this.

I've used BackTrack from a USB stick but it doesn't like my wifi adapter.  So I tried Backbox and that likes my stuff and works pretty well.  Just wondering if there is something you'd recommend over either of these?

I am going to try running Backtrack in VMWare player and see if it works at all.  The main focus for me is wifi testing, although I might do some tests on my webserver as well.

Thanks and may the 504 force be with you!

Ta for that, I was looking for a tool set for such a purpose and Backbox is pretty much perfect. I purchased a few ebooks on the subject as I am thinking of specializing in this after I redo my CCNA exam (I now have a Cisco physical test lab in my man room YAY!)

That's funny, I just borrowed Netsim from my buddy Jim.  Figured I'd mess with it some rainy day.

Backbox seems to work great.  I also tried Kali, but only for a few minutes so far. It's just like Backtrack but I think it's just a modern version of BT.  I find Backbox a lot easier to use, and I also think it looks bad ass when just sitting at the desktop.

I just like to stare at it and pretend I'm in the film Hackers.

Haha nice.

How are you running it? I've been doing it from a thumb drive. I tried both vmware player and virtual box but the installer errors out.

Can someone tell me how you update linux if you are running it from a thumb drive?  Do I just update as normal?  Will it forget everything once I reboot?

Can any of you guys answer the above question? I can't find much info about updating.  It just says boot from the thumbdrive and use, but nothing about updating.

How you update it depends on what distro it is. But yeah it being on a thumbdrive shouldn't affect how you do so.

Does it make a difference if it is a live distro rather than an installation? I thought you couldn't make changes to a SquashFS file system? Though I could be completely wrong.

This.

Depends how the thumb drive installation was created. Some of the automated toola have an option to partition the drive for the boot volume and storage. Not sure if that works for updates.

Ah yeah, I think I was doing it wrong!  Imagine that.

So this time I booted from the thumb drive and chose install and installed it to a second thumb drive.  Now it should see it as a normal installation and not a live install.  Thanks for all the info!

Good point! Describing it as /installed/ to a thumbdrive I assumed non-live but yeah you may be right.

Except he didn't say installed.

This is what happens while I try to think while watching eurovision.

Dirty boy.

There was an interesting amount of boobage on show during that.

(We had it on while having a party and playing telestrations. It's a hilarious game with as much boobage as you care to draw).