installing into a virtual machine (VM), or it can be burned to a DVD to install to a
physical machine.
Kali Linux is based on Debian. This was not always the case, at least as directly as it is
now. There was a time when Kali was named
BackTrack Linux
. BackTrack was based
on Knoppix Linux, which is primarily a live distribution, meaning that it was
designed to boot from CD, DVD, or USB stick and run from the source media rather
than being installed to a destination hard drive. Knoppix, in turn, inherits from
Debian. BackTrack was, just as Kali Linux is, a distribution focused on penetration
testing and digital forensics. The last version of BackTrack was released in 2012,
before the Offensive Security team took the idea of BackTrack and rebuilt it to be
based on Debian Linux. One of the features that Kali retains that was available in
BackTrack is the ability to live boot. When you get boot media for Kali, you can
choose to either install or boot live. In
Figure 1-1
, you can see the boot options.
Figure 1-1. Boot screen for Kali Linux
Whether you run from the DVD or install to a hard drive is entirely up to you. If you
boot to DVD and don’t have a home directory stored on some writable media, you
won’t be able to maintain anything from one boot to another. If you don’t have writa‐
ble media to store information to, you will be starting entirely from scratch every
time you boot. There are advantages to this if you don’t want to leave any trace of
