Parrot 4.5 is officially released, and there are some major changes under the hood, 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 writting 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.
Better Dev Tools
There are updates in metapackages for developers, and setting up an advanced development environment for several programming languages and frameworks is now easier than ever:parrot-devel
It is pre-installed in Parrot 4.5 and provides the following tools:- vscodium - an advanced and extensible text editor.
- zeal - an offline documentation downloader and browser.
- git-cola - a graphic client to GIT.
- meld - a graphic patch inspector.
- tora - a graphic database frontend compatible with several database backends.
The metapackage also recommends the installation of parrot-devel-tools.
sudo apt update
sudo apt install parrot-devel
parrot-devel-tools
It is recommended by parrot-devel and pre-installed in Parrot Security. It provides some useful compilers and interpreters for the most used languages and provides the following packages:- GCC/G++ - a compiler collection for C, C++ and other languages.
- python3 - the cpython interpreter for the python 3.6 and 3.7 language.
- ruby - the official ruby lang interpreter and basic toolkit (includes irb and ri as well).
- default-jdk - the latest Java OpenJDK distribution for Java 11 (both JDK and JRE).
- cython3 - a compiler for the cython language, a strongly-typed dialect of python for efficient code.
- rust/cargo - the rust compiler and devel tools and its package management system.
- valac - the vala c compiler.
- mono-devel - the development tools for the MONO framework, an open source implementation of .net.
- mono-runtime - the runtime of the MONO framework compatible and interoperable with the latest .net runtime.
- php-cli - the PHP 7.3 language plus its command line interface and some useful core libraries.
- perl6 - the PERL 6 interpreter and core libraries.
sudo apt update
sudo apt install parrot-devel-tools
parrot-devel-extra
The parrot-devel-extra metapackage is a quick way to install many additional development utilities like advanced IDEs, additional languages, debuggers and extra tools.- golang - go language compiler and runtime
- nodejs - node.js framework
- npm - node.js package manager
- atom - advanced and extensible editor by github
- qtcreator - powerful C, C++ and Qt/QML IDE and debugger.
- kdevelop - advanced general purpose IDE by KDE.
- edb-debugger - graphical debugger.
- jad - Java decompiler.
- nasm - powerful general purpose x86 assembler.
- radare2 - advanced command line hexadecimal editor.
- cmake - cross-platform, open-source make system.
- valgrind - nstrumentation framework for building dynamic analysis tools.
- devscripts/build-essential - useful development utilities for debian developers/maintainers.
sudo apt update
sudo apt install parrot-devel-extra