Downloading the 410 MB ISO file from the Sectoo website went without any problem. After burning the image onto a rewritable DVD, I was able to boot using my HP Athlon 64 Pavilion notebook.

Alt-F1 will let you watch all the drivers and services start up.

Eventually I received a root command prompt and logged in with a carriage return. I entered the usual startx, at the root command line, to bring up the Xfce window manager.

Sectoo was immediately able to find my built-in RealTek RTL8139 ethernet chip. Although I was hopeful, my Broadcom 4306 WiFi chip was not detected. Sadly, the situation happened with my USB powered D-Link DWL-122 WiFi adapter. Rousseau mentioned that ndiswrapper worked, but I simply didn't have time to get everything configured.

Keep in mind that this is a very early Alpha release and there are probably still a few glitches.

Normal services like SSH, Apache2, Snort, and Samba all started automatically.

Users will need to know their way around networking because I couldn't find any selections (on the desktop menus) to help in setting up wireless cards or restarting network services.

Using the 10/100 card, common programs like nmap, netstat, and tcpdump worked properly.

Users accustomed to seeing OpenOffice.org, Konqueror, or the KDE desktop will be a little out of their element.

Again, judging from the tool list, this distribution is definitely built for a niche group of security oriented users.

Overall the Xfce interface worked well and was fast, in spite of running from a live-CD. Firefox is always there to help find information, as long as your ethernet cable is connected.

Next: Wrapping Up »