An interesting question posed about Kali: "Why is Kali Linux so hard to set up and why won't people help me?"

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This might make a solid link to share with some folks:

unix.meta.stackexchange.com

Why is Kali Linux so hard to set up? Why won't people help me?

I've installed Kali Linux, or I'm trying to install it. Why is it so hard? Why doesn't it recognize my hardware? Why do I need to set up so many things manually? Why can't I install the application...
unix.meta.stackexchange.com unix.meta.stackexchange.com
 


Great find! Good topic to sticky as you already did.
 
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We can hope that some folks read it.

That question, on the SE sites, would only be allowed in meta. So, that's where it is.
 
LMFAO, the thought process of most "1337 h4xx0r" Kali users is that it's like that club we don't talk about:

1st rule of Kali Linux: You do not talk about Kali Linux
2nd rule of Kali Linux: You DO NOT talk about Kali Linux.
3rd rule rule of Kali Linux: If someone says "help",goes to a forum, or uninstalls Kali the h4x0rr1ng 1s 0v3r.
4th rule of Kali Linux: 0n1y tw0 guy$ t0 4 h4ck.
5th rule of Kali Linux: 0n3 h4ck 4t 4 t!m3.
6th rule of Kali Linux: No FPGAs, no social-engineering emails.
7th rule of Kali Linux: Haxx0r!ng will go on as long as it has to.
8th rule of Kali Linux: If this is your first install of Kali Linux, you HAVE to h4ck.

Jokes aside I'm so tired of people trying to use Kali as an OS. Even though I 9/10 times only see posts on other places of the internet, it just annoys me. It started irritating me before I even joined linux[dot]org.
Problem is, and I am not racially profiling here because this is observed statistics, that there are many Indian YT videos on Linux where the distro used is Kali (perhaps because of the name -- should've stuck with Backtrack). So there are both bad and well-meaning (oft converging) tips on non-pentesting related things using Kali and this publicity combined with all the "Western world" blogs does not help, it just keeps promoting misuse. In a way, this harms the Linux community since when people do get burned, they blame it on GNU Linux as a whole. It also reaffirms the idea "Linux is like this complicated nerd OS and you have to use the command line for everything" when people should be promoting distros like Mint and the other "pretty" (by default), user-friendly Linux OSes.

Maybe I should add one of the following to my sig:

"If you don't know Kali Linux, you don't know Kali Linux"
"If you don't know Kali Linux, you shouldn't be using Kali Linux"
"If you have to ask about Kali Linux, you don't know Kali Linux"

...Maybe all three, they make a good recursion within a recursion.
 
Fanboi said:
LMFAO, the thought process of most "1337 h4xx0r" Kali users is that it's like that club we don't talk about:
Click to expand...
I could not agree more - maybe they watch too much Mr Robot and thought it would be cool or some other nonsense - I put Kali in the same line as OSGeoLive - a Linux for a specific purpose - in OSGeoLive is designed for Geospacial work - Kali is designed for penetration testing - neither is designed for normal everyday desktop use.
 
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I remember all of the underground hacker magazines that were around back in the Windows 98 days.

Underground hacking seems to have been all the rage back in the Windows 98 days.

Don't know anything about hacking and have no interest seems like a good way to get into some serious criminal trouble.
 
old timer said:
Underground hacking seems to have been all the rage back in the Windows 98 days.
Click to expand...

It used to be much easier, I find. I still keep up with what's going on, but haven't done any 'hacking' (in this sense of the word) in a long time.

Many years ago, you used to be able to set up and ping a giant chunk of the IPv4 space in not a whole lot of time. Then, you go through the response headers looking for people who were dumb enough to put their printers online - accessible from a public IP space.

Now, you have that information, so you probe them all to see who was also dumb enough to leave the default login credentials...

Once you have that information, you can (especially older HP printers) have some fun. With old HP printers you could easily find/modify the firmware. So, instead of the user facing the normal menu on the physical printer, the LCD displays "Insert 25¢ To Continue".

These days, people are (often) smarter, devices hardened, and are just generally more secure.

Heck, back in the day you could do what was known as "google hacking". You could use a few search queries to find people's live video feeds from their security systems, default login pages to test credentials, and all sorts of neat stuff.
 
Kali isn’t difficult to install or use if you have a good understanding of Linux.

At the end of the day Kali is a curated toolbox for hackers/security/forensics professionals. It’s not an every day, general use distro.
I usually keep a copy on a memory stick, in case I need it for anything. But it’s very rare that I do. It has been handy a few times though.

Most of the people who ask questions about Kali are not qualified, or experienced enough to be installing, or running Kali.

Hell, I’ve been programming in various programming and scripting languages since I was 8 or 9 years old. I’ve been programming professionally for the best part of 20 years. I’ve been running Linux as my primary operating system for over 15 years. And even I feel barely qualified to run and use Kali sometimes, ha ha!

The OS itself is a doddle, but understanding how to effectively use some of it’s tools is extremely challenging. Some of the tools require a lot of in-depth background knowledge.
 
Fun fact Kali Linux was previously known as Back Track.
 
f33dm3bits said:
Fun fact Kali Linux was previously known as Back Track.
Click to expand...

I seem to recall reading about that on Slashdot, back when it was contemporary.

Man, I've spent a lot of years on /., I'm pretty sure my original account is old enough to vote.
 
Well after spending the majority of an entire day I have concluded that the installer for Kali is brain dead. Nothing but problems getting it installed and after many aborted attempts it did install but seems to have botch grub so cannot launch it any way. Think I will just scrub partition and try Mint.

Having installed a number of Ubuntu distros over the years I assumed installers for other flavors would be as trouble free.

Boy Kali proved me wrong.

Does anyone have a list of kali tools to install in Mint or Ubuntu?

I am giving up making Kali play nice.

Thanks guys...
 
PaulK said:
I am giving up making Kali play nice.
Click to expand...
It never does.
Instead of Kali try Parrot, easy install, comfortable daily use desktop and a full set of pen-testing tools available

oh and welcome to the forums
 
Here are a few
Wireshark
Code: 
sudo apt install wireshark
Aircrack-NG
Code: 
sudo apt install aircrack-ng
NMap
Code: 
sudo apt install nmap
THC Hydra
Code: 
sudo apt install hydra-gtk
HTTrack
Code: 
sudo apt install httrack
SQLMap
Code: 
sudo apt install sqlmap
 
Thanks....going to try Mint. Always had good luck with Ubuntu but want something different so will give that a try.
 
you could of course just put it onto a usb stick and even have persistence. Then you could go through the menu. See the ventoy thread on this site

+ wpscanner
 
captain-sensible said:
you could of course just put it onto a usb stick and even have persistence. Then you could go through the menu. See the ventoy thread on this site

+ wpscanner
Click to expand...
Yea that stick works fine. It's the installer that won't play. I don't want to use stick other than to experiment with live distros. Live finds LAN but installer is blind. It's gone I reformatted the stick, wiped the partition and burning a Mint installer. bye bye kali
 
If you use LMDE you should be able to install the forensics-all package which includes:
acct, aesfix, afflib-tools, aircrack-ng, arp-scan, binwalk, braa,
bruteforce-salted-openssl, bruteforce-wallet, brutespray, btscanner,
bully, capstone-tool, ccrypt, cewl, chaosreader, chkrootkit,
cowpatty, crack or crack-md5, dc3dd, de4dot, dirb, dislocker, dnsrecon,
doona, dsniff, ed2k-hash, exifprobe, ext4magic, extundelete,
ewf-tools, fcrackzip, forensic-artifacts, forensics-colorize,
galleta, grokevt, hashid, hashrat, hydra, john, mac-robber,
magicrescue, maskprocessor, masscan, mdk3, mdk4, medusa, memdump,
metacam, mfcuk, mfoc, missidentify, myrescue, nasty, nbtscan, ncat,
ncrack, ndiff, nmap, o-saft, ophcrack-cli, outguess, pasco, patator,
pff-tools, pipebench, pixiewps, pnscan, polenum, pompem, recoverdm,
recoverjpeg, reglookup, rephrase, rfdump, rhash, rifiuti, rifiuti2,
rkhunter, rsakeyfind, safecopy, samdump2, scalpel, scrounge-ntfs,
shed, sleuthkit, smbmap, snowdrop, ssdeep, ssldump, statsprocessor,
stegcracker, steghide, stegsnow, sucrack, tableau-parm, tcpick,
testssl.sh, undbx, unhide, unhide.rb, vinetto, wapiti, wfuzz,
winregfs, wipe, xmount, yara
Click to expand...
 
craigevil said:
If you use LMDE you should be able to install the forensics-all package which includes:
Click to expand...

That also works in Ubuntu, as I just learned. (Thanks!)

Code: 
search forensics-all
forensics-all - Debian Forensics Environment - essential components (metapackage)
forensics-all-gui - Debian Forensics Environment - GUI components (metapackage)
forensics-full - Full forensics station (metapackage)

Err... 'search' is aliased to 'apt-cache search', which is why the above looks a little funny.

I did not know this. I now know this. It's article-worthy, I think. Thanks!
 
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