Download and Copy Image to SD Card

First, check out the Kali Linux - Raspberry Pi page. You should find a link to a downloads page containing a recent image for the Raspberry Pi A/B+ or the Pi 2 - grab the one that's appropriate for your hardware. I went with kali-1.1.0-rpi2.img.xz.

As of this writing, the v1.0.9 image for the Raspberry Pi A/B+ TFT may work out of the box on a Model B+ with a PiTFT, and might even supply all the drivers and configuration you need for the PiTFT display. It will not boot on a Pi 2, which is why we're going to do it the 'long' way

The rest of the Kali installation instructions are quite good - you could probably just follow them and come back here.

On my Ubuntu laptop, I decompressed the image with:

xz --decompress kali-1.1.0-rpi2.img.xz

And used the following dd invocation to copy the image to an SD card in my USB card reader:

sudo dd if=kali-1.1.0-rpi2.img of=/dev/sdc

Get a Terminal on Your New Kali Box

If you're using an HDMI monitor and keyboard, you should see a login prompt after the Pi finishes booting, looking something like this:

By default, the user is root and the password is toor.

Alternatively, you can make sure the Pi is connected to the network, and use an SSH client from another machine. That's the approach I'm taking:

I know that my Pi is at 192.168.1.4 because I configured my router to always assign that IP address to its ethernet interface's MAC. If you don't know yours for sure, you can take a couple of approaches. The simplest is probably to log in from a console and type ifconfig:

Just look for the eth0 line containing a string like inet addr:192.168.1.4.

If that's not an option and you have access to a machine with Nmap installed, you can instead try doing a ping sweep of your network with a command like nmap -sn 192.168.1.1-254 :

You could also use the Adafruit Pi Finder from a Windows, Mac, or Linux desktop to locate the Pi and get a terminal.

Basic Post-Installation Setup

Once logged in, you should do a bit of simple housekeeping on the new installation.

Since it's not very safe to leave the default password on a machine, start by setting a new password for the root user with the passwd command:

Once that's done, reconfigure the OpenSSH server to generate new host keys with dpkg-reconfigure openssh-server:

That should be it! Now we can move on to setting up the PiTFT.

This guide was first published on Apr 21, 2015. It was last updated on Apr 21, 2015.

This page (Installing Kali) was last updated on Apr 09, 2015.

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