One consideration is the tools provided by the hypervisor.
The tools are drivers that
get installed into the kernel to better integrate with the host operating system. This
may include print drivers, drivers to share the filesystem from the host into the guest,
and better video support. VMware can use the VMware tools that are open source
and available within the Kali Linux repository. You can also get the VirtualBox tools
from the Kali repository.
Parallels, on the other hand, provides its own tools. At the
time of this writing, you can install the Parallels tools in Kali, but they’re
not fully
supported. But in my experience, they work well even if they aren’t fully supported.
If you’d prefer not to do an install from scratch but are interested in using a VM, you
can download either a VMware or VirtualBox image. Kali provides support for not
only virtual environments but also ARM-based devices like the Raspberry Pi and the
BeagleBone. The advantage to using the VM images is that
it gets you up and running
faster. You don’t have to take the time to do the installation. Instead, you download
the image, load it into your chosen hypervisor, and you’re up and running. If you
choose to go the route of using a preconfigured VM, you
can find the images at the
page
on Kali’s site for downloading one of these custom images.
Another low-cost option for running Kali Linux is a Raspberry Pi. The Pi is a very
low-cost and small-footprint computer. You can, though, download an image specific
for the Pi. The Pi doesn’t use an Intel or AMD processor as you would see on most
desktop systems. Instead, it uses an Advanced RISC Machine (ARM) processor.
These processors use a smaller instruction set and take less power than the processors
you would usually see in desktop computers. The Pi comes
as just a very small board
that fits in the palm of your hand. You can get multiple cases to insert the board into
and then outfit it with any peripherals you may want, such as a keyboard, mouse, and
monitor.
One of the advantages of the Pi is that it can be used in physical attacks, considering
its small size. You can install Kali onto the Pi and leave it at
a location you are testing
but it does require power and some sort of network connection. The Pi has an Ether‐
net connection built in, but there are also USB ports for WiFi adapters. Once you
have Kali in place, you can perform even local attacks remotely by accessing your Pi
from inside the network. We’ll get into some of that later.
With so many options
to get yourself started, it should be easy to get an installation
up quickly. Once you have the installation up and running, you’ll want to get familiar
with the desktop environment so you can start to become productive.
Desktops
You’re going to be spending a lot of time interacting with the desktop environment,
so you may as well get something that you’ll feel comfortable with.
Unlike proprietary
operating systems like Windows and macOS, Linux has multiple desktop environ‐
