It's powered by the latest Linux 4.16 kernel series

May 21, 2018 14:24 GMT  ·  By

The development team behind the Debian-based Parrot Security OS announced on Monday the release and general availability of the final Parrot 4.0 operating system series.

Powered by the latest Linux 4.16 kernel series, Parrot 4.0 is a major release of the GNU/Linux distribution designed for ethical hacking and penetration testing operations. It's the first to introduce stable, reliable support for sandboxed applications as an extra layer of security, and official Netinstall and Docker images.

"Parrot on Docker gives you access to all the Parrot containers you need on top of Windows, Mac OS, 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," said the devs.

MD RAID support, Nginx replaces Apache, updated components

Parrot 4.0 is also the first release of the ethical hacking operating system to ship with MD RAID support enabled by default. This helps those who use Parrot for forensics analysis to open software raids when reading disk drives in a server environment, as well as to allow the installation of Parrot in a software raid, for better reliability.

The lightweight Nginx web server debuts as the new default web server daemon in Parrot 4.0, replacing the Apache web server, and MATE 1.20 is now used as default desktop environment. Among other updated components, we can mention the latest Mozilla Firefox 60 "Quantum" web browser and LibreOffice 6.0 office suite.

For a full list of changes included in the Parrot 4.0 series since Parrot 3.11, check out this document. Parrot 4.0 is now available to download for new deployments, but existing users can upgrade from a previous release right now by executing the following commands in a terminal emulator.

sudo apt update
sudo apt purge tomoyo-tools
sudo apt full-upgrade
sudo apt autoremove