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ParrotSec announced today the release of Parrot 4.9, a new major release of their security-oriented GNU/Linux distribution for penetration testing and ethical hacking.
Parrot 4.9 is here a little over a month after Parrot 4.8 and ships with the Linux 5.5 kernel series. This means that it brings better hardware support and improvements for Wi-Fi cards and Intel GPUs.
However, Linux 5.5 series has reached end of life with the Linux kernel 5.5.19 update released last week. This means it won’t be supported anymore, so if you can upgrade Parrot 4.9 to the latest Linux 5.6 kernel series, do it as soon as possible.
Another major improvement in the Parrot 4.9 release is a new installer, which is based on Calamares, the universal installer framework used by numerous GNU/Linux distributions, such as Lubuntu, Manjaro or KaOS.
Being based on Debian GNU/Linux, Parrot Security OS still includes the Debian Installer for those who need it or don’t like Calamares.
“Calamares makes the whole installation process not only better but also faster, by asking for partitioning first, and then configuring the user later while the installation runs in the background,” explained the devs.
The Parrot Menu application launcher received some attention too in this release. Its menu structure was improved and redundant or duplicated launchers were removed. Parrot uses MATE as default desktop environment.
Anonsurf, the anonymous mode used by Parrot OS, has been updated with support for dnstool, bash-completion of commands, nyx support for the status command, and daemon support.
Also worth mentioning is the fact that Parrot 4.9 removes all the penetration testing tools that relied on Python 2, which is no longer supported. These will be replaced with new tools in future releases.
Last but not least, this release includes all the latest software updates and security patches from the upstream Debian GNU/Linux 10 “Buster” repositories.
You can download the many flavors of Parrot 4.9 right now from the official website. But, since Parrot is a rolling release distribution you can update your existing Parrot 4.8 installations using the sudo parrot-upgrade command.
Last updated 4 years ago
