I’m teaching Reverse Engineering and Malware Analysis again this semester. And as usual, I’m retooling a laptop for the express purpose of using it for this class. I’m using the same laptop as last year (Asus Zenbook Prime UX31A). I’m just going to document the configuration and decision-making process here. If anyone has any questions or suggestions, please let me know in the comments!
First off, I’m pretty sick of the lack of progress from ElementaryOS, so a new operating system is in order. As much as I’d like to use FreeBSD, I think it would be a hassle getting the entire toolchain working. More importantly, I don’t think I can ask the students to jump off that bridge, so I’m going with a mainstream choice. The primary OS on the laptop is going to be Ubuntu 14.04.3 LTS. Nothing fancy, just a default install of the Desktop version of the OS.
There were a few tweaks I had to make to get things settled on the Asus. First the default DPI made everything too small. I edited: /usr/share/lightdm/lightdm.conf.d/50-xserver-command.conf, and added -DPI 170.
I tweaked the touchpad sensitivity and functionality.
I enabled TRIM for the SSD, and tweaked the atime setting to minimize writes. (link needed).
First tool install is going to have to be VirtualBox. Since the Ubuntu Software Center doesn’t have a build of version 5, I downloaded and installed 5.0.14 from the Virtualbox website. I’m going to hold off on installing the Oracle VM Extension Pack, since I like to keep a bit of distance between the host and guest OS, and the extension pack essentially does the opposite. I installed the VM Extension Pack since the features I wanted to avoid have been moved into VBox itself, and the ability to scale the display (necessary for teaching) resides in the extension pack.