Parrot 4.5

Having reaped the benefits of Kali Linux already, Mayank Sharma wonders what new things Parrot can offer in this saturated space.

- Mayank Sharma

Ostensibly, there doesn’t seem to be any difference between Kali Linux and Parrot. They both seem to be conduits for the gazillions of tools available for the ethical hacker to prod the robustness of their networks. But head to Parrot’s download section and you’ll realize the project has a wider mandate than its peers. Besides the main pentesting edition, Parrot also has a Home edition designed for day-to-day use for anyone who cares about privacy and online anonymity. With the latest release, the project has dropped support for 32-bit machines.

Getting back to the main edition, Parrot offers an extensive boot menu. When used from a USB disk, you can choose to boot into the Live environment along with a persistent partition to save your changes. There’s also a very useful option to encrypt this persistent partition. Unlike its peers that are designed to be run as a live medium only, Parrot can be installed to disk and also features a number of everyday desktop apps including LibreOffice, VLC and a lot more. You can grab more using the Synaptic package manager. Interestingly, the distro uses its own repositories instead of Debian’s, since it has some apps that aren’t compatible with Debian’s guidelines.