Didier Stevens

Tuesday 6 January 2009

Quickpost: Running BackTrack 3 on a Eee PC

Filed under: Eee PC,Quickpost — Didier Stevens @ 20:44

I want to run the BackTrack 3 Live CD on my new Eee PC 901. Here is how I configured a SD card to boot the BackTrack 3 USB Version (not the same as installing the BackTrack 3 distro on a SSD or SD card).

  • start Windows XP on Eee PC
  • download the BackTrack 3 USB version
  • use unetbootin to install the BackTrack 3 iso file to the SD card
  • copy 901_net_gfx.lzm to the \BT3\optional directory on the SD card (details and download here)
  • edit file /boot/syslinux/syslinux.cfg on the SD card to add these lines after the LABEL… line:
LABEL EEE
MENU LABEL BT3 EEE Mode
KERNEL /boot/vmlinuz
APPEND vga=785 initrd=/boot/initrd.gz ramdisk_size=6666 root=/dev/ram0 rw load=901_net_gfx autoexec=startx

The following step is only needed if you want to change the keyboard. I use a Belgian keyboard, so I want the default KDE keyboard to be the BE keyboard, not the US keyboard. We will update the kxkbrc file in the root.lzm compressed directory. sda1 is the SD card I booted from, adapt according to your configuration.

  • Boot BackTrack 3 from the SD card and get a root shell
  • cp /mnt/sda1/BT3/base/root.lzm .
  • mv /mnt/sda1/BT3/base/root.lzm /mnt/sda1/BT3/base/root.lzm.original
  • mkdir newroot
  • lzm2dir root.lzm newroot
  • edit file newroot/root/.kde/share/config/kxkbrc
  • edit the LayoutList property and move the be value to the beginning of the comma-separated list, like this:
    • LayoutList=be,us,ch,br,cz,fr,de,it,pl,sk,gb,dk,de
  • save file kxkbrc
  • dir2lzm newroot root.lzm
  • mv root.lzm /mnt/sda1/BT3/base

You can use the same procedure to edit other (config) files, or add files like your favorite utilities.


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