My first venture into the world of GnackTrack

Following the release of BackTrack 4, I of course became incredibly excited and burned a copy of it as soon as I could. Pentesting is not something I've ever tried before, but is something I am incredibly interested in. Aside from the typical Black Hat escapades one would expect from someone using such an OS, I'm actually quite interested in the security aspect of technology. While my technology focus is mostly web development, with a small side of desktop programming (I have a very unfinished screenshot utility for Linux, written in Python. It currently only takes fullscreen shots and uploads to Imgur), I do want to eventually focus on finding and fixing security flaws in both server and client settings. Back to the paragraphs intro, BackTrack. Upon booting BackTrack for the first time, two horribly crippling flaws came to my attention:

1. THE ENVIRONMENT WAS KDE!
   - I am very adverse to KDE. Stable, but incredibly ugly in my opinion. I just can't stand it, and have always had an instant aversion to it.
2. It did not fully support my graphics card!
   - The highest resolution I could achieve with BackTrack RT4 was 800x600; the only alternate being 640x400. My highest possible resolution is 1280x800. Not very high, but still so much better than 800x600.

That was months ago. No matter how many different pentesting distributions I tried, none seemed to support my graphics card (laptop model is Compaq Presario F700, cba to find out specific hardware).

Although I only found it a few days ago, I honestly can't recall where I first saw it. GnackTrack, a potential solution to my display resolution problems. GnackTrack is a Ubuntu-derived Linux distribution meant to function as BackTrack, but with a Gnome environment. As it is derived from the latest releases of Ubuntu, I figured that since Ubuntu supports almost all my hardware (save for my internal mic), GnackTrack should too! I boot into it... Success! Full resolution! But wait- What is this... No internet connections available? Suddenly my massive excitement is completely gone, and I'm flashing back to my first experience with Ubuntu. I was so excited to try something new that I completely wiped my hard drive to install only Ubuntu, just to discover that the version at the time (8.10) did not support my wireless card, and I was stuck without internet access for months, as I had ventured into Linux alone, without anyone to aid me. Oh goodness, I love venturing off topic. Anyways, I've submitted a bug report on the GT forums, and am currently downloading the most recent version of BackTrack to see if it supports my graphics card yet. Fun stuff! Below is a video of my first boot into GnackTrack. At the end I decided to demonstrate one of the tools that I have previous experience with: macchanger. Ignore the bit of fail there, I had forgotten the syntax, and my wireless typically operates on wlan0 but for some reason it's defaulting to eth0.