After several Beta versions, months of work, and considerable backlog, sand released the release of the new version of the popular pentest-focused Linux distribution "ParrotOS 4.8”. And is that developers report that they have been overdue with the launches and development of the distribution because they are working together on a total redesign, In addition to the fact that they are working on a migration to Docker-compose, they also mention that they have a new gitlab instance, new mirrors redirection, etc.
For those readers who still do not know the distribution I can tell you that Parrot Security is a Debian-based Linux distribution developed by the Frozenbox Team and this distro has a focus on computer security.
It is designed for penetration testing, vulnerability assessment and analysis, computer forensics, anonymous web browsing, and practicing cryptography.
Parrot OS is intended to provide testing tools for penetration testing equipped with different types of tools for user to test in their laboratory.
Parrot is based on Debian's stretch branch, with a custom Linux kernel. Follow a mobile release development model. The desktop environment used by the Parrot OS Linux distribution is MATE, and the default display manager is LightDM.
What's new in Parrot OS 4.8?
This new version of the distribution arrives in sync with the Debian Testing package base as of March 2020, in addition to that the heart of the system was updated to Linux kernel 5.4 Although, as many of you will know, it is a modified version to be able to perform the pentest tasks, many improvements are received, among which are greater hardware support, among other things (if you want to know the news of this version of the Kernel you can check the following link).
On the part of the desktop environment of the system, the inclusion of MATE 1.24 in which they present the first results of the MATE application portability initiative for Wayland, as well as support for additional formats rpm, udeb and Zstandard.
On the part of the system tools we can find the updated versions of: anonsurf, aircrack 1.6, airgeddon 10.01, beef 0.5.0, burpsuote 2020.1, vscodium 1.43, libreoffice 6.4, metasploit 5.0.74, nodejs 10.17, postgresql 11, radare2 4.2, radare -cutter 1.10, weevely 4.0 and wine 5.0.
Another of the changes of this new version and about what caused the delay of the launch of this new version was the work done with Docker, with which now The following can be run on any Docker-compatible operating system:
- parrotsec / core
- parrosec / security
- parrotsec / tools-nmap
- parrotsec / tools-metasploit
- parrotsec / tools-metasploit
- parrotsec / tools-beef
- parrotsec / tools-bettercap
- parrotsec / tools-sqlmap
Finally if you want to know more about it About this release, you can check the details in the following link
Download and try Parrot OS 4.8
For those who are interested in being able to download this new version of the distribution can go directly to the website official of the project in which in its download section you can find the image of the system.
You can save the image with the help of Etcher on a USB.
On the other hand yeah you already have a version of Parrot OS from branch 4.x, you can perform an update of your system without having to reinstall it again on your team.
To do this you simply have to open a terminal and in it execute the following commands:
sudo parrot-upgrade
Or you can use these:
sudo apt update sudo apt full-upgrade
This process will take a little time since you have to download all the packages first and then update them. So you can take a moment to relax.
At the end of the process, you just have to restart your computer so that all the changes are saved and you can start your system with all the updated packages and the new Linux Kernel of this version of Parrot OS 4.8.
To verify that you already have the new kernel, just type in the terminal:
uname -r