Kali Linux (formerly known as BackTrack) is a Debian-based distribution with a collection of security and forensics tools. It features timely security updates, a choice of four popular desktop environments, and seamless upgrades to newer versions. Kali Linux is Now a Rolling Distribution.
This is a small guide on how to add official Kali Linux Repositories – I’ve updated it to include all versions of Kali Linux till date i.e. Kali 1.x, Kali 2.0/Kali Sana and Kali Rolling.
The single most common causes of a broken Kali Linux installation are following unofficial advice, and particularly arbitrarily populating the system’s sources.list file with unofficial repositories. The following post aims to clarify what repositories should exist in sources.list, and when they should be used.
Any additional repositories added to the Kali sources.list file will most likely BREAK YOUR KALI LINUX INSTALL.
Edit your sources.list
The easiest way is to edit the
/etc/apt/sources.list
Add official repo’s only:
Copy paste the following repositories (remove existing lines or you can comment them out – your take). Following repo list was taken from official Kali sources.list Repositories page:
The Kali Rolling Repository
Kali-Rolling is the current active repository since the release of Kali 2016.1 and 2016.2. Kali Rolling users are expected to have the following entries in their
sources.list
:Save and close the file.
Retired Kali Sana (Kali 2.0) Repositories
For access to the retired Kali Sana or Kali 2.0 repositories, have the following entries in your
sources.list
:Save and close the file.
Retired Kali moto (1.0) Repositories
For access to the retired moto repositories, have the following entries in your
sources.list
:Save and close the file.
OLD Instructions (Kali 1.0 – does not work anymore)
I’ve kept these for historical purpose only, these repo’s worked on Kali 1.x (2013 – 2015). Do no follow these anymore.
Clean your apt-get
Do an apt-get update
Do an upgrade
Finally do a distribution upgrade
That’s it, you’re set.
Conclusion
Despite what many unofficial guides instruct you to do, avoid adding extra repositories to your sources.list files. Don’t add kali-dev, kali-rolling or any other Kali repositories unless you have a specific reason to – which usually, you won’t. If you must add additional repositories, drop a new sources file in
/etc/apt/sources.list.d/
instead. [Source: Offensive Security Blog]If you must, (despite warning many users will be tempted), do try it in a VirtualBox/VMWare first and take snapshots so that you can roll back. Kali updates are quite big and takes a lot of time to download and their DVD ISO’s are not very up to date. You can build your own custom updated ISO by following these instructions and keep using that offline.
Thanks for reading. If I have made a mistake, please correct me.
So I am trying to install Kali Linux on my mac as a dual but for some reason, the last step is on their documentation page did not work for me!
It Asks me to type something similar to this
the image that I downloaded is
kali-linux-light-2019.1a-armhf.img
which is the latest version provided by their website so the command I am trying to run is this But unfortunately, I got this error
$-bash: sudo dd if=kali-linux-light-2019.1a-armhf.img of=/dev/disk2 bs=1m: No such file or directory
Hence I run my commands on the Desktop directory where the image lives.
zx485
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1 Answer
I see several things wrong here.
- You have downloaded the wrong disk image. The ARMHF image is for ARM systems. I'm frankly not sure why Kali even provides this as a download, as there are very few ARM systems in existence which will boot from a USB storage device.
- You have somehow managed to mistype the command line in such a way as to make your shell think that the entire command is supposed to be a filename. I'm not sure how you managed to do this; I've been unable to reproduce this error.
- You are attempting to install a Linux distribution which is intended for experienced Linux users. The issues you are having here suggest that you may be new to the command line in general; I would strongly recommend that you read the Kali documentation page Should I Use Kali Linux?, and consider installing a different distribution such as Debian or Ubuntu Linux.(Note as well that Kali Linux is not designed with hardware compatibility as a major goal. It may not run on your laptop at all.)
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