[RomeoJava]

The advantages of *nix are huge, especially for security but to really appreciate them you need dedicate time to learning it. When i say dedicate time to learning it, I mean using it as your primary OS.

It isn't as friendly as windows, it can be a total pain in the ass, but it is getting easier. In the Redhat 6.0 era when I started, hardware support was s**t but since then the improvement has been dramatic. Now most people can do an install and get all there hardware detected correctly without having to do any config.

The advantage, in security research terms are that you can go down to as low a level as you want, as the OS gives you access to all the operations you need to do (especially networking operations). When people discover security flaws, they want to write programs that demonstrate them. One thing they don't want to waste time on is writing pretty interfaces like almost every windows program has. it is a waste of time, functionality is what is important. These attributes, low level functionality mixed with the low development time mean that pretty much all exploit code is written in *nix.

Apart from that, the advantages mean that all the best security tools are written in *nix, e.g. Nmap. To see the power of *nix, in relation to security research (which is what I assume you are interested in) you can try it without worrying about your hard drive. I suggest WHAX (http://iwhax.net). It is Live CD distro which has lots of security tools included.


Am still a newbie here, anyone correct me if I'm wrong!

Rj :rolleyes:

[yevonxxx]

if i can say mine,linux is really driving me crazy(damned winmodem..),this doesn't mean i'll give up,as if you try it you immidiately see the concept of total freedom and over all total configuration(also a total head-ache... :P ).
the price you pay for it is that if you want those power,you must study and learn how to us it,and putting for the first time the hands on the command prompt of the console is not friendly at all.