We have of course been following BackTrack since the very early days, way back in 2006 when it was just known as BackTrack – A merger between WHAX and Auditor.  They’ve come a long way and BackTrack is now a very polished and well rounded security distro, most of the others have dropped off the map leaving BackTrack as the giant in the security LiveCD space.
The last major release was BackTrack Final 4 Released – Linux Security Distribution – back in January 2010.
The BackTrack Dev team has worked furiously in the past months on BackTrack 5, code name “revolution” – they released it on May 10th. This new revision has been built from scratch, and boasts several major improvements over all our previous releases. It’s based on Ubuntu Lucid LTS – Kernel 2.6.38, patched with all relevant wireless injection patches. Fully open source and GPL compliant.
The interesting part for me is that the new .ISO downloads offer multiple versions, including a choice between GNOME and KDE desktops and the images include ARM, 32-Bit and 64-Bit versions.
New in Version 5 :
  • Based on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS
  • Linux kernel 2.6.38 (with wireless injection patches)
  • KDE 4.6
  • GNOME 2.6
  • 32-bit and 64-bit support
  • · Metasploit 3.7.0
  • Forensics mode (a forensically sound instance)
  • Stealth mode (without generating network traffic)
  • Initial ARM image of BackTrack (for Android-powered devices)

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