What linux distro do you recommend?

[elimist]

I plan on running hashcat on a bunch of really old computers. Most have 128 mb ram, only a few GB hdd space, pentium processors. What linux distribution would you recommend?

[atom]

not sure if the distribution make a diffrence. ubuntu 9.x has been tested a lot and it works fine on there. more important is that the cpus support sse2

$ grep sse2 /proc/cpuinfo

[elimist]

yes but some are significantly smaller than others, and I don't need all the desktop apps.

[hops]

you can setup a ubuntu server without gui using the ubuntu alternate cd

or if you want to take a deeper look into linux, i recommend you arch linux

[elimist]

ok, I have an ubuntu server 64bit installed on my usb drive without gui. How do I run or install hashcat? I tried extracting the hashcat-cli.bin, but it says "unknown suffix -- ignored". I also tried copying the .bin to "/bin", and running it but it just says "-bash: /bin/hashcat-cli.bin: No such file or directory" although I can clearly tell that the file is there by running ls.

[atom]

unrar x hashcat-0.34.rar
./hashcat-cli.bin -h

[elimist]

It still says "No such file or directory". I am a bit confused now because pressing tab after typing half of the file name completes it, so the system should know it is there.

[atom]

hashcat is a 32 bit only app and you are on 64 bit linux. so you need to install 32 bit compatibility libraries. maybe this helps: sudo apt-get install ia32-libs

[elimist]

Thanks. I installed that and rebooted and now it works.