If you decide to remove the default kismet install on Backtrack Linux so you can then compile kismet from source you will be missing some functionality. One of the bits of functionality not installed by default on Backtrack 5 release 3 is the PCRE Regex Filters. You can easily enable this functionality by installing a single package before you run the kismet configure command when compiling the source.
I have been playing around with some of the bluetooth tools within Backtrack recently and btscanner is one of the main tools I have bene using. The btscanner application in Backtrack Linux provides two bluetooth scanning functions it calls inquiry scanning and brute force scanning. Unfortunately the package installed with Backtrack 5 release 3 will crash when attempting to use it for brute force scanning however I was able to create a fix that isn’t too messy to accomplish. Below we describe the btscanner crash in more detail and provide a way to get btscanner bluetooth brute forcing operating properly.
While compiling some earlier versions of bluez, which provides support for core bluetooth layers and protocols, I ran into a minor error. The error complained about no check being available. Read below to see the initial error when running ./configure and how to install the check package to resolve the errors. Installing the check package will fix this problem likely on any platform but for sure on Ubuntu 10.04 since Backtrack Linux is currently built on that platform.
Some tools in Backtrack Linux version 5 R3 were written for older versions of Python so if you are interested in using some of these tools in can be beneficial to install older versions of Python such as Python 2.4. Below I describe how to easily install Python 2.4 without causing issues with the Python 2.6 that is installed by default on Backtrack Linux 5 R3 or Ubuntu 10.04.
Earlier when installing snort on a CentOS Linux server I ran into a configure error. The error related to the fact that libdnet was not located on the server and while it was installed I did not have the libdnet-devel package installed. Below is the sample output from the configure error, an expandable complete output of the configure error, and the yum command to install libdnet-devel to move past this error when installing snort.