ismailamca

Ive been using ubuntu nearly 10 years as my primary os on every my servers and desktops, they really came a long way. We hated eachother bigtime, however if you decide to get on well with each other somethings may be unseen. However ubuntu is a great os and still my number one, and i love unity(really). Also the ubuntu comunity definitely rocks. You can find nearly everything's .deb packages, you'll have apt which is one of the main reason why i still use this os. It's dead simple. But if you really need low hardware and high performance i think you really take a look BSDs. However you need an os that runs well, is sufficient for doing internet tasks, can handle your scripting things, can do developping stuff, etc... go debian derivatives (ubuntu, mint,...)

if you are comfortable with gdb go with it or else i generally prefer hexdump, objdump and radare2 over gdb (for linux pwnables). i really like radare2, and ctfs generally come with radare nowadays.

however, i think, the most important thing about cracking challenges is your knowledge, you need to learn the paltforms, the architecture, possible vulnerabilities and exploitation of all. so you may benefit reading some vulnzines like phrack and valhalla, some vxforums or papers from exploit-db. also there are very nice books where you can learn basic exploitation techniques(shellcoders handbook, hacking the art of exploitation, etc...). these may be useful if you really have the basic aspects, if you aren't comfortable with shell(bash, sh, zsh, etc..) you should get comfortable with them at the begining.

also you need to learn some c and another scripting language(like python, perl, ruby, lua etc...) for effective cracking (in *nixes).

and don't use windows, it makes you lazy.

also you can take these courses, that would be a marvelous start http://www.opensecuritytraining.info/

<IMPORTANT!> before starting these please ask yourself, why do you do this to yourself? go and get a (girl|boy)friend instead of this. the security field is such a §H!™ hole and endless.

TL;DR: go with radare, and crack this challenges first >> https://exploit-exercises.com/

i had the same problem and was looking around for a new notebook. ihad some performance issues with my previous one, lackness of gpu proccessing and couldn't run multiple monitors at the same time for a long time, i wasn't able to calculate molecular foldings and handle very big chunks of data at the same time with it, by the way that machine had a first-gen i5 and nvidia gt330m (1gb of anciency). so i ought to buy a new laptop; my little goliath.

anyway this is what i am trying to say: define your needings then go shopping, or ask with that way.

my needings was as yo can figure, was listed above. so i bought an lenovo a z5070 < http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/lenovo/z-series/z50/?sb...: >

you know there is a huge scandal and they are trying to cope with that with giving huge discounts! i think it is a good time for buying a lenovo, if only you'll run it as a linux box. by the i hate windows and i'm so lucky they don't care. i think windows should be a keyboard company, their keyboards are definitely awesome. < update was for keyboards >