Outwardly, Kali looks the same as the previous version of BackTrack. But dig a little deeper, according to founder Mati Aharoni, and that’s where the similarities end.
“It boots like BackTrack, but when you look deeper into Kali, you see all these amazing new features that just weren’t available in BackTrack,” Aharoni told SC speaking ahead of the launch in Amsterdam.
From Kali’s site comes this:
From an end user perspective, the most obvious change would be the switch to Debian and an FHS-compliant system. What this means is that instead of having to navigate through the /pentest tree, you will be able to call any tool from anywhere on the system as every application is included in the system path. However, there’s much hidden magic in that last sentence. I’ll quickly list some of the new benefits of this move.
Backtrack has been a very useful resource for me and prominently listed in the Tools section on this site. One of the main features that I gleaned from this release is support for ARM. I haven’t poked around the site or created a Kali VM to play with yet. Will report whatever I observe later.