Penetration testing (pentesting) distribution without systemd

Interesting inquiry that has lead searchers to this site for an answer but hasn’t yet specifically been answered.  So I will take a shot at answering this.

Basically, and as far as I know, there is a Gentoo based distribution specific to this task and as it is based on Gentoo it is easily free of systemd, although if you really like systemd I am pretty sure you can have it on Gentoo.  This narrows down to options based on Debian (kali and parrot), and Arch (blackarch and archstrike).    There may be others we don’t know of yet.

History of Arch without systemd

While researching the development of consolekit and its fork, consolekit2, I run into a really interesting thread in the Arch forum.  This was the beginning of Arch-OpenRC it seems and this is how the Arch hierarchy dealt with the inquiry and proposals.  The very first thing they did was to hide the thread from search engines, visible only to registered users.  Then they tried to push the guy in pursuit of this project to do what he wants elsewhere, not seek collaboration through the Arch forum.  The guy is none other than @Artoo, the force behind the Manjaro-OpenRC project, and one of the people who last year founded Artix.

Artix new repository structure for testing [gremlins]

The new repository structure for testing in artix follows the pattern of arch and substituting labels to avoid confusion.

Gremlins is the term for what Arch calls testing, and goblins is the term for what Arch calls staging (where dev.’s place new packages while they are being debugged and getting ready for production –> testing).  For users not willing to contribute to development, other than “testing” their work, goblins is no place to be.  Most certainly things will be “broken” in goblins, and if they weren’t they would be in testing, or to be distribution correct “gremlins”.  For stable users, nothing has changed.

Artix: missing dependency and how to get it – [arch-testing]

This only applies to those using Artix-Testing and have no previous Arch-linux experience.

Today some meandering in the system-testing directory resulted in a package upgrade of libpsl that requires an additional pkg, libidn2.

Quote from: nous

If you use Artix testing repos, you should also use Arch testing repo, libidn2 is there and soon will be in ours.

You say “should” but this is the first time I encounter such a rule.

Artix backgrounds

How to chroot properly in Artix and repair your installation

I recently had a problem with all my Artix installations, as I had been away for a few days, I came back and decided to update them all. I had blind faith in Artix and its testing repositories and learned my lesson. It seems as I got caught within that period where updates were uploaded and mirrors were not fully synced. So all my upgrades seem to have been half done, even though it showed “all up to date nothing to do”. Glibc mkinitcpio, elongid, etc. were not all of the same edition and the kernel images produced were unbootable.

Converting from Manjaro or Arch to Artix

• Is the conversion from Arch the same as Arch-OpenRC?  If you have an arch or arch based systemd system, can you convert to Artix as easily following the applicable procedure moves?

https://wiki.artixlinux.org/Main/Migration  This is for migrating from systemd Arch or Manjaro.

The guide at  https://systemd-free.artixlinux.org is for migrating from arch and manjaro  -openrc