Exercise 4-3: Kali Linux standard ARM Install

There’s a chicken-and-egg problem here. To keep things standardized, we would rather have you perform all of these steps in Kali. That way, you have all the tools you need, and we can walk you through it without explaining the process on multiple OS’s (Windows, OS X and Linux). But in order to do this from Kali, we need to get the image over to Kali and the most reliable and straightforward way to do this is with scp which relies on the ssh service. But we don’t touch on SSH until the next chapter.

So although it’s not ideal, we’ll shoehorn in the SSH procedure here so we can move along and we will discuss the details more in the next chapter. From your Kali installation:

Edit the /etc/ssh/sshd_config file. Find the line PermitRootLogin without-password and change it to Set PermitrootLogin yes.

Start sshd:

Enable sshd at boot:

Now, you should be able to ssh into your machine as root/toor:

Now we can move the xz file into our Kali VM. Try to avoid VM drag-and-drop. It can be problematic:

Next, insert your (minimum 8GB) SD card and find the proper disk ID:

Uncompress the xz file:

(Alternatively, check out xzcat).

Run the dd with the correct disk identifier (/dev/sdb in our case). Warning! Get this right! Do not simply copy these values, change them to the correct drive path corresponding to your SD card.

Slap in your SD and boot up your new Kali Pi. You’ll ned to hook up HDMI to see what’s going on, and a USB keyboard and mouse to type and click. Any you’ll have to plug in an Ethernet cable to get network (it’s DHCP). Oh, and there’s no SSH listening by default. And if you do manage to get in, you’re pretty much at bare metal. ifconfig doesn’t even work! Yes, this is a little lame. Don’t you wish you had more control over things? Read on.