hey, im new and got a question

[thejayman2010]

hey ppl, got a question, im buying an old second hand computer, i used to practice hacking in my younger years on windows xp, thats the OS the machine im buying is running, i learnt how to do a 3 way handshake on msn to obtain my victims (hot victim) ip adress,

just wondering what ppl think the best OS is to learn the basics on?

[bad_brain]

Linux...of course...
what distro is a matter of personal taste, personally I prefer Debian.
on Windows the OS tells you what you can do, on Linux you tell the OS what you want to do.

[thejayman2010]

thanks, i just reviewed Debian and it looks pretty good but when u download any programs is it easy to install?

[ph0bYx]

It takes some while to get used to Linux if you haven't used it before. But don't worry, there are massive amounts of documentations and tutorials on the net and if you have a problem you can ask here freely

[bad_brain]

depends on what programs you want to install...but the Debian repositories are really huge, so even if an application you are looking for isn't in there you usually find some alternatives.
have a look here:
http://packages.debian.org/stable/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

every application in there can be installed with just 1 command (apt-get install packagename). of course you can always compile applications from source too, which is also really simple in most cases.

as ph0 wrote, it takes a little until you are familiar with Linux when you are used to Windows. so the best is to set it up as a 2nd system first, because jumping into the cold water by saying "ok, from today I will switch completely to Linux" mostly ends up in frustration for beginners...

[thejayman2010]

ok thanks for the info, mite give it a try cuz i cant put xp on my laptop, i know we had that disscution on here b4 but there ya go. thanks anyway

[leetnigga]

FreeBSD is cooler.

[thejayman2010]

the only problem i have with downloading Debian is when i go to download a copy from there website, it dont just say "click here to download" it gives u loads of other options like "[alpha][amd64][arm][armel][hppa][i386][ia64][mips][mipsel][powerpc][sparc]"
why cant it just be easy?

[leetnigga]

Those are CPU architectures. If you have an old processor you probably need i386. amd64 is for modern CPUs with 64-bit capabilities.

With Windows you have the same thing, except the choices are more limited. I wouldn't say it's such a complicated matter.

[Artificial Interceptor]

As i used to say/write Windoze, if you take windoze CE, ME and NT you'll end up with Windows Edition 'Cement' wich is the danish word for Concrete...
Windows is a limited platform of operating system, there's allways rules you have to 'play' by, and oh Windows has an habbit of pulling spam, viruses etc in.
That's why Linux is preferable to everything except for gaming offcourse unless you have a windows platform emulator installed in your Unix system. Unix is the bedst for writing program language no matter what language it is...

I prefere Linux Ubuntu or SUSE

[DNR]

WTF! I think I like Artificial Interceptor.. wordy motherfucker, but well spoken...
Welcome neo

DNR

[lykos]

I like using ubuntu myself. It is well documented and it is up to date with a very good development cycle. The best part is you can add backtrack repositories to ubuntu to get all of the security tools that are available in backtrack.