One of my colleagues has got me using Backtrack for pen testing. I have used Whoppix/Whax in the past but Backtrack has come a long way since then.

I was really enjoying it until I tried to install OpenOffice and Krusder... dependency hell. I like Slackware but I've said it before, its package management sucks to put it bluntly. Why couldn't the Backtrack developers have chosen Debian, Fedora, Gentoo etc etc as a base. Any distro with a modern packagement system.

Great distro but tarballs are so old school, I guess I have been spoilt by Gentoo. Backtrack is destined for a VM but not my primary Linux pen testing desktop.