I’m a bit surprised to see talk of BackTrack4 since it seemed like BackTrack3 is barely a year old. Alas, a new version can only be a good thing! Shmoocon attendees got to check out a pre-release version and I wouldn’t be surprised if they did an IRC channel pre-release outing as well. Hopefully sometime soon BT4 will be widely released to the public or available to me via some other channels.

I had a few small quibbles about BT3 over BT2. I was unimpressed with the tossing away of the stealthy boot up. BT2 was very quiet on the wire, while my experiences with BT3 involved it starting up and immediately wanting an IP from the first network it saw. The BT3 hard disk installer was still pretty unintuitive, although the forums are invaluable for figuring it out.

BT4 goes back to the stealthy startup (omg newbies, you gotta start network!), and from what I gather will be much friendlier for a more permanent distro-like install (I’m assuming, here). I enjoy the livecd a lot, and someday I’m sure I’ll enjoy a USB install more, but some of us really don’t mind at all loading it on some older laptop for permanent use and tinkering. A vmware image as well? That might be worthy of a little jizz in my pants!