Hi My name is Dan and I really got interested in Linux Phlak and all of it security tools, and utilities. I have both (Fatboy, and Littleboy), and I read that they've, (the developers) .decided to go in a different direction with their creative endeavors. Are there others working on a new release, it just seemed that they split before it was a really finished and polished product.
If anyone has heard of any new developements into the PLAK project please let me know.
I like to fool around with these programs, and I'd really appreciete any helpful responsed that I can get. Thank you very much. I hope to hear something on this.:scratch! :-) Oh, by the way I'm kind of new to this stuff so try not to get too geeky with the language, thanks.

I liked phlak too, still use it every once in a while for forensics/data recovery. It recognizes and configures a lot of hardware others don't, like Mandriva and Knoppix live cds. (but have you tried ubuntu/kubuntu live cds?)

Alas, the phlak team split, and unless someone takes up the torch, it'll slowly fade in to the past as hardware changes over time.

But there's good news, a team has done similar with Knoppix, stripping a lot of the bloat and giving just the forensic tools and a minimal of web functionality, it's called Helix, and I use it on the road with a persistent desktop and my email and web browser configured.

And it's better than phlak at getting up and running, and in the forensics department too. (I could never get phlak to mount usb external storage, Helix gives you uber-root access to everything... so be careful!)

Here's the project site:

http://www.e-fense.com/helix/

My hat's off to the e-fence team.

Phlak, we loved ya... may you rest in peace.

cat

Check out BackTrack. It has over 300 up-to-date security tools. It is great for doing penetration tests.

http://www.remote-exploit.org/backtrack.html

I guess I can live with vesa fb mode. But why doesn't BackTrack start the network at boot? Having a heck of a time getting it started, keep getting hostname lookup errors.. so far no network.

Helix rocks.