Out of the gate I hit the dreaded black screen. It took about an hour to find the right combination of grub tweaks to get it to boot and launch X. From there I will have to say that an i5 and 8GB of RAM is sheer overkill for this distribution. I did like the number of tools loaded into the live disk and the ease of use of the Ubuntu based apt installer made it easy to get the extra tools I wanted in my load. This left some testing of the tools to see if they performed any better than the windows versions.
For the most part I was pleasantly surprised at how well everything worked. I did find that the wlan0 adapter was not talking well with ssidsniff even when calling the adapter explicitly in the argument tags. Small issue really and I fully admit that in the short amount of time I did not try Kismet. I was able to quickly pull off an (on my own network of course) arp poisoning MITM attack using SSLStrip which I had seen demonstrated from the BlackHat tutorials and a few YouTube links prior. I was really impressed at how many tools were available to the user for security concerns. Nessus, OpenVAS, and Snort were full installs with some of my more favorite tools such as Nikto and Ettercap.
I have to say that I'm sad I did not pick up this distribution earlier. BT5 is great and it would have saved me all those hours configuring my previous Ubuntu installs with tools had I just moved to this instead. I will also say that it is likely that the Lenovo hardware on this is what caused most of my issues. I will play around with it a little more this week before my summer courses get crazy and perhaps get it going in a VirtualBox environment although having real adapters in place of bridged mode NICs is always nicer.
