This is old news, but VMWare has implemented a free virtual machine player. I took a look at some of the community generated distros out there and wasn’t impressed at the offerings in the security and penetration testing fields. So, using some freely available tools (Qemu and VM Builder) I am compiling virtual machines of the top linux security distributions (and some others).

Stay tuned as the VM’s are created and uploaded.

BackTrack
Distro Version: 2.0 Public Beta
Appliance Version: 0.1
Not every version of linux is a fork: BackTrack shows that when you combine two good security distros, like Whax and Auditor, you get something special. Based on SLAX, this distro holds all the wireless, password, sniffing, cracking, analyzing tools you might need.
Download BackTrack Appliance
MD5: 794683c043179c7ba54c5d88e8f986f2
Note: The tar.bz2 file contains vmx file and hard drive (vmdk), preloaded with BackTrack.
Issues: On my Ubuntu install of vmware, I get an error when the player starts about vmnet0. I have found that if you run the following code, BackTrack can connect to the internet: sudo vmnet-bridge -d /var/run/vmnet-bridge-0.pid /dev/vmnet0 eth0

PHLAK
Stay tuned

Knoppix-STD
Stay tuned

nUbuntu
Stay tuned

Getting the VMWare Player
In Ubuntu: sudo apt-get install vmware-player
Windows / Other OS’s: download it