Gentoo Forums

Hi there !

I post here this little message to announce you the upcoming release of a new distro called Sectoo Linux. Here are a short description, as you can read on the main page of our website (http://www.sectoo.org/) :


"Sectoo Linux is an upcoming Linux distribution aimed to help all sort of people with tasks related to network security.
Under the form of a LiveCD based on Gentoo Linux, you will be able to achieve tasks such as port scanning, packet sniffing, OS fingerprinting, intrusion detection, ..."



For those who knows about Trinux, our distro will be a little similar, but since Trinux is not maintained anymore, we thought that creating a new distro was a good idea.

For the moment, it is the very beginning of Sectoo Linux, we are actually preparing a pre-alpha version which will be released soon we think, so there is not much content on the website.

You can also visit our boards at http://forums.sectoo.org/, and of course register there, the support about Sectoo will be provided there in the future. NOTE : you will notice that our boards are a little similar to the Gentoo Linux boards, this is intentional. This way you won't be lost when going there.



Another thing : we think that we'll need help sooner or later, so any "want-to-help" people is welcome there !



Thank you for the time spent reading this !
PurpleSkunk (Anthony),
Admin of Sectoo Linux.

Nice...

Have you heard about nUbuntu livecd? I think their goals are quite same.

Yes, I have heard of it, as well as Pentoo Linux, which is a similar project.

Sectoo Linux will try to be some sort of "synthesis" of all of these tools.

Hope our goal will be achieved !

Hello all !

We are happy and proud to announce you that the pre-alpha version of Sectoo Linux has been released today !

So we count on you for reporting bugs, misconfigs, feature requests and whatever you want to say about Sectoo Linux...

We think that the pre-alpha testing phase will last for at least one month.

Thank you for your attention !
Anthony.

PurpleSkunk wrote:For those who knows about Trinux, our distro will be a little similar, but since Trinux is not maintained anymore, we thought that creating a new distro was a good idea.

Then why not help out Trinux and stop that "one man army" way of doing Linux distros.

Something is really wrong with Linux community IMHO.

Because the man who held once the Trinux project had totally given it up. On top of that, SourceForge doesn't want to host "new" distro projects anymore, and for them starting over with Trinux was considered as a new distro (I know that for sure, because I asked them).

IMHO there is nothing wrong with the Linux community, and I really can't point out what you meant this way. If you don't like the idea of "yet another new" distro, nobody forces you to use it. I know that much distro like this already exists, but i'm doing this one MY way, I learn so much things doing that, and I share my work with other people. Once again, I really don't point out what's wrong with that, especially regarding the Linux community. But I would be very pleased if you would explain to me what you mean.

Regards,
Anthony Rousseau

PurpleSkunk wrote:Because the man who held once the Trinux project had totally given it up. On top of that, SourceForge doesn't want to host "new" distro projects anymore, and for them starting over with Trinux was considered as a new distro (I know that for sure, because I asked them).

IMHO there is nothing wrong with the Linux community, and I really can't point out what you meant this way. If you don't like the idea of "yet another new" distro, nobody forces you to use it. I know that much distro like this already exists, but i'm doing this one MY way, I learn so much things doing that, and I share my work with other people. Once again, I really don't point out what's wrong with that, especially regarding the Linux community. But I would be very pleased if you would explain to me what you mean.

Regards,
Anthony Rousseau

Now I understand your problem- Trinux is deprecated- no offence. But I still recommend to join some already existing project and help out guys who need more brainpower. Of course if you feel yourself like "primadonna" and can't work with other programmers and think that only you know how to make good distro then go ahead.

I know how hard is to keep project going/alive- I am one of the "distro guys" but I joined already existing project and I'm glad I did- everything develops faster and quality is better... I am not saying what project it is (trying not to advertise) but we got 25000 iso downloads in two weeks after last release and community is growing (over 3000 users in forums).

Good luck.

It's true that the presence of a crapload of distros can be a little unnerving but it's also a fact that making everyone work on the same distro isn't possible in reality and won't make things much better anyway since then the guys making the decisions would be only a few that sit on top of the pyramid (see MS). Since an uber-distro isn't possible, the best you can hope, Antik, is that people will think twice before starting a new distro and consider seriously joining another one, first. However, there is no reason to think that every single distro team hasn't already done that. Since there also isn't an objective way to judge when the decision to start a new distro is mostly wrong, the only thing you can do, Antik, is having faith that people know what the fuck they're doing - which is also necessary because of the complete lack of power you hold over their actions. If we add to this the complete absence of reasons to think you know any better than anyone else, I think the massage is clear; it starts with a capital S To Finish with a capital U and its meaning is functionally equivalent to "let people do what they want without bothering them".

Thanks to you antik !

No offence taken !

I don't feel myself like primadonna, but it is true that it want to do most of the things myself. Joining an existing distro was effectively an option, but I preferred to make this one my way, as I said. However, I am in close relations with the guys at Pentoo Linux, and maybe one day in the future (nobody knows !), our distros may get together to make one, ...

But I thank you for pointing out these facts, and I thank you for wishing me good luck !

Way I see it we have 200 of these types of distros already, bootable LiveCD's that feature nmap and such. Why doesn't someone create a install-to-hard-disk variant? Seriously, that's the ONE THING I HAVEN'T SEEN DONE. Personally I don't see the need at all, I just keep nmap and my primary tools on my main box, if I ever needed them somewhere else I'd just make sure to have a Linux laptop or something like that handy.

Hello predatorfreak.

Your post contains some interesting points.

First of all, install to disk is a feature we plan to set up in future releases. Secondly, although there is 200 differents similar distros (I think there is much less, but anyway this is not the point we want to discuss, right ?), there is only twho of them based on our favorite distro : Gentoo (there is Pentoo, which is great, and mine). So you're maybe right about the fact there is no need for another one, but not needing it for you doesn't mean nobody needs it. The main goal of Sectoo Linux is to provide an out-of-the-box system for these kind of tasks, so of course you can have the included tools on your main box, but having all of them on a LiveCD may comes handy : you save space on your box, having a CD on you takes less space than a laptop , and you can use it on almost every computer you find.

Your post really sounds right, but it also sounds redundant as every new distro gets a lot of comments like this.

Another point about multiple liveCD distros: depending on how you go about detecting hardware, you may need two or three to get a LiveCD running.

No, you say, hardware detection in Linux is great? I beg to differ! (to an extent; I've had great luck for the most part) When I had to back up my wife's hard drive, I tried about four bootable LiveCDs (I remember Recovery Is Possible, and System Rescue CD, and Knoppix, and I think one more). To my surprise, all but one (can't remember which, but I think it was a Gentoo variant maybe!) locked up solid during boot! The hardware wasn't even that weird (Asus A7N8x Deluxe with a SATA drive, CD-rom, and GeForce video card, which shouldn't matter).

So having a bunch of tools available isn't so bad. True, other projects could use the help, but there's nothing particularly wrong with going it alone if you have something new to offer.

In Sectoo Linux we use an initrd similar to the Gentoo LiveCD initrd, coupled with the livecd-tools packages. I've tested in on some different machines (even on a Pentium II 450 !) and luckily all the machines were correctly recognized...

Additional tool suggestion(s)

I find the Sectoo concept interesting and useful, but there's something I'd like more, that is reasonably logical to fold into it.

Limited forensics tools

I run both chkrootkit and rkhunter through cron. But I still hold more than a little fear/mistrust that some rootkit will come along that can completely hide itself from any software running on that booted machine. I'd like to see a LiveCD that will check out the hard-disk filesystems of the machine it's booted on for rootkits. Presumably it could run on as little as the location of grub/lilo, using that to find the bootable root, /etc/fstab, and so on.

Nice project. You'll find a post of mine there already

predatorfreak wrote:Way I see it we have 200 of these types of distros already, bootable LiveCD's that feature nmap and such. Why doesn't someone create a install-to-hard-disk variant? Seriously, that's the ONE THING I HAVEN'T SEEN DONE. Personally I don't see the need at all, I just keep nmap and my primary tools on my main box, if I ever needed them somewhere else I'd just make sure to have a Linux laptop or something like that handy.

Uhmm, you have not looked very hard then. I can name at least three off the top of my head. Ubuntu, BackTrack, and Knoppix. I think Slax can do the same.

beatryder wrote:

predatorfreak wrote:Way I see it we have 200 of these types of distros already, bootable LiveCD's that feature nmap and such. Why doesn't someone create a install-to-hard-disk variant? Seriously, that's the ONE THING I HAVEN'T SEEN DONE. Personally I don't see the need at all, I just keep nmap and my primary tools on my main box, if I ever needed them somewhere else I'd just make sure to have a Linux laptop or something like that handy.

Uhmm, you have not looked very hard then. I can name at least three off the top of my head. Ubuntu, BackTrack, and Knoppix. I think Slax can do the same.

Knoppix isn't supposed to be installed, just for random info. It was a third-party who made the install script.

You could also file the Gentoo LiveCD in there, as well.