Parrot 4.0 is now available for download.
The development process of this version required a lot of time, and many important updates make this release an important milestone in the history of our project.
This release includes all the updated packages and bug fixes released since the last version (3.11), and it marks the end of the development and testing process of many new features experimented in the previous releases since Parrot 3.9.
Experimental Netinstall Images
Netinstall images are a powerful tool to install only the bare core of the system or just the software components you really need, you can even use them to install another desktop environment and to build your own system exactly as you want.
On Parrot 4.0 we decided to provide netinstall images too as we would like people to use Parrot not only as a pentest distribution, but also as a framework to build their very own working environment with ease.
Developer Team of Parrot Project consider this installation method as experimental because sometimes the installer fails when using https mirrors (using http mirrors work fine), and because it is harder to debug issues on uncommon package combinations, but Developer Team are going to keep these variables in consideration in the future.
Docker images
Docker is a powerful container technology that allows our users to quickly download a Parrot template and immediately spawn unlimited and completely isolated Parrot instances on top of any host OS.
Parrot on Docker gives you access to all the Parrot containers you need on top of Windows, Mac OS X, or any other system supported by Docker, no matter if it is just your laptop or a whole docker cluster running on an entire datacenter. You will always have access to all the parrot tools in all the isolated environments you need.
Developer Team also offer different Docker images: a core container with only the bare system, a more complete environment with a lot of useful tools, and a container dedicated to the metasploit environment. But you are free to download our Docker files, customize them and build your very own Docker templates with just the tools you need, or you can download the core template and install additional tools into it.
Linux Kernel upgrade to 4.16
The introduction of the new Linux 4.16 kernel is a very important step forward for the distro, as newer kernels always introduce many important new features, broader hardware support and important bugfixes.
The previous Parrot 3.11 release used Linux 4.14, which included basic Spectre and Meltdown fixes, while the true effective patches are included since Linux 4.15.
The 4.16 version includes other important updates, including AMD GPUs multi-display fixes, optimized in-kernel filesystem operations and so on.
Sandbox
The Parrot system is known to be secure and sandboxed thanks to its custom firejail profiles with the underlying apparmor support. Parrot Security OS 4.0 is the final result of months of testing on this field, and now the sandboxed applications are stable and reliable.
MATE Desktop 1.20
The MATE Desktop Environment was updated to its 1.20 release, with many graphic bugfixes and new features, like HiDPI support, or the ability to auto-resize windows by dragging them to the corner of the screen and divide them in new layouts.
Nginx
Nginx is its most powerful alternative, it is very light weight and easy to use, and it is famous to be not only a fast and secure web server, but also a powerful proxy, cacher, load-balancer and general purpose forwarder. And its configuration syntax is very easy to use.
For this reason we decided to include nginx as our new default web server daemon, while apache2 will be available in the repository, or pre-installed as a dependency of some security tools that rely on it.
LibreOffice 6
Read the LibreOffice 6 release notes
Firefox Quantum 60
MD Raid Support
Parrot 4.0 now includes MD Raid support by default.
It was a great lack in the previous versions, because parrot is also meant to be used for forensics analysis, and to be able to open software Raids can be crucial while reading disks in a server environment.
Of course the introduction of mdadm as a pre-installed tool also mean that parrot can be installed in a software Raid for better reliability.
How to upgrade to 4.0
Open a Terminal window and type the following commands:
sudo apt update
sudo apt purge tomoyo-tools
sudo apt full-upgrade && sudo apt autoremove
Read full list of Updated Packages here
From ParrotSec
