Backtrack 5, VNC and XRDP

Friday, August 26, 2011 at 12:00PM
Kieran Jacobsen in backtrack, wireless

Just working on my project that I will be unveiling prior to Tech Ed(and will mostly be giving demonstrations of whilst there) and I discovered a rather annoying bug in Backtrack 5.

I was attempting to set up XRDP which is simply a neat little wrapper for VNC and for the life of mean, whenever I connected, either with my RDP client using XRDP or with a VNC client through any of the VNC server options, I couldn't launch any of the tools included with Backtrack 5, for example, when trying to run airodump-ng, you would get the error: "/bin/sh airodump-ng: command not found". I hacked away at various bash profiles and settings, various system settings and pulled my hair out for days; still I couldn't get anything to work.

I knew this worked on Backtrack 4, so what could the possible errors be?

1. Backtrack 5 is based on Ubuntu 10.04, Backtrack 4 was based on 8.04
2. Both versions I was running were 32bit
3. Backtrack 4 came with a VNC option by default, maybe the guys had pre hacked this together to work?
4. I was running the KDE version of Backtrack 5, and well Backtrack 4 was an older version of KDE

Out of interest sake, I tried the Gnome version Backtrack 5; and it appears to work.

So, if you want to use VNC (and XRDP) use the GNOME version of Backtrack 5!

Article originally appeared on Aperture Science (http://kjacobsen.squarespace.com/).