The operating system is now powered by Linux kernel 4.19

Jan 22, 2019 13:09 GMT  ·  By

Parrot Security have released a new version of their ethical hacking and penetration testing GNU/Linux distribution that brings updated components and a major change for the project.

Parrot 4.5 is now available, powered by the long-term supported Linux 4.19 kernel series, preparing the project for the upcoming Parrot 5.0 LTS release. For future releases, Parrot Security plans to a support two kernels, stable kernel and a testing kernel.

Parrot 4.5 also comes with the latest Metasploit 5.0 penetration testing framework, which introduces major features like new evasion modules, a new search engine, a json-rpc daemon, integrated web services, and support for writing shellcode in C.

This release improves the metapackages for developers,  making it a lot easier to set up an advanced development environment for multiple frameworks and programming languages. These include parrot-devel, parrot-devel-tools, and parrot-devel-extra.

Parrot 4.5 drops support for 32-bit computers

On the other side, Parrot 4.5 is the first release of the ethical hacking operating system to no longer ship with installation or live images for older, 32-bit only computers. With this, Parrot joins the growing trend of GNU/Linux distributions dropping 32-bit images. However, the developers noted the fact that they will continue to support the 32-bit architecture with updates through the official software repositories for existing users.

"We have released 32-bit (i386 architecture) images since the beginning of the project, and we worked hard to provide fresh binary updates for the i386 architecture for a long time. However, 32-bit-only computers are no longer capable of running a full pentest campaign or providing hardware-accelerated support to our security protection systems," said developer Lorenzo "Palinuro" Faletra.

Parrot 4.5 remains based on the Debian Testing branch of the Debian GNU/Linux operating system and it is available for download only as 64-bit images in two editions, Parrot 4.5 MATE Home Edition and Parrot 4.5 KDE Plasma Home Edition. This is also the first release of the ethical hacking distribution to offer virtual appliances in the OVA format that users can import in VirtualBox, QEMU, or VMWare.

Metasploit 5.0 on Parrot 4.5
Metasploit 5.0 on Parrot 4.5

Parrot Security OS 4.5 (2 Images)

Parrot 4.5
Metasploit 5.0 on Parrot 4.5
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