Despite the turmoil in the world, we are thrilled to be bringing you an awesome update with Kali Linux 2020.2! And it is available for immediate download.
A quick overview of what’s new since January:
KDE Plasma Makeover & Login PowerShell by Default. Kind of. Kali on ARM Improvements Lessons From The Installer Changes New Key Packages & Icons Behind the Scenes, Infrastructure Improvements KDE Plasma Makeover & Login With Xfce and GNOME having had a Kali Linux look and feel update, it’s time to go back to our roots (days of BackTrack) and give some love and attention to KDE Plasma. Introducing our dark and light themes for KDE Plasma:
Many outstanding discoveries have been made by our vibrant NetHunter community since 2020.1, so we have decided to publish a mid-term release to showcase these amazing developments on selected devices. Massive thanks to our dedicated developers @Kimocoder, @PaulWebSec, @simonpunk, yesimxev, & #DJY who did an incredible job in bringing you the following highlights:
Monitor support for Qualcomm wifi chips in various snapdragon SOCs New RTL88XXXU drivers with injection support New USB function management GUI for HID attacks and much more GitLab CI to dramatically speed up the release workflows NetHunter Kernel-Builder to simplify building custom kernels Brand new NetHunter images for the following devices Nexus 6P with Android 8.1 Nexus 6P with LineageOS 17.1 OnePlus 7 with Android 10 Xiaomi Mi 9T with Miui 11 Nexus 6P images for Android 8.1 and LineageOS 17.1
Just a quick update to the 2020.1 release we put out last month. We made some major changes to the installers, and some people had a few issues with some of the images we released. So, we made some slight alternations to smooth things out and make the install process easier for everyone.
There was some recent noise around children and their use of Kali, so @Re4son stepped up with a new way to run Kali in locations where it may have been hard to in the past. This allows you to run Kali instances inside other Unix systems, making Kali even more accessible to kids than before. Welcome LXD.
We are here to kick off our first release of the decade, with Kali Linux 2020.1! Available for immediate download.
The following is a brief feature summary for this release:
Non-Root by default Kali single installer image Kali NetHunter Rootless Improvements to theme & kali-undercover New tools Non-Root Throughout the history of Kali (and its predecessors BackTrack, WHAX, and Whoppix), the default credentials have been root/toor. This is no more. We are no longer using the superuser account, root, as default in Kali 2020.1. The default user account is now a standard, unprivileged, user.
For years now, Kali has inherited the default root user policy from BackTrack. As part of our evaluation of Kali tools and policies we have decided to change this and move Kali to a “traditional default non-root user” model. This change will be part of the 2020.1 release, currently scheduled for late January. However, you will notice this change in the weekly images starting now.
Five years ago, the Python developers announced that they will stop supporting Python 2 in 2020. For a long time, nobody cared and Python 3 adoption was slow. But things have changed a lot lately as the deadline is right around the corner (1st January).
Debian is removing Python 2 support Debian is planning to get rid of Python 2 entirely for their next stable release so they are progressively getting rid of Python 2 code. They filed release critical bugs on leaf packages (i.e. packages without reverse dependencies) asking them to be ported to Python 3. If the Python 3 port is not happening soon enough, these packages will be removed from Debian Testing (which is what Kali is based on).
Time to grab yourself a drink, this will take a while!
We are incredibly excited to announce our fourth and final release of 2019, Kali Linux 2019.4, which is available immediately for download.
2019.4 includes some exciting new updates:
A new default desktop environment, Xfce New GTK3 theme (for Gnome and Xfce) Introduction of “Kali Undercover” mode Kali Documentation has a new home and is now Git powered Public Packaging - getting your tools into Kali Kali NetHunter KeX - Full Kali desktop on Android BTRFS during setup Added PowerShell The kernel is upgraded to version 5.3.9 … Plus the normal bugs fixes and updates. New Desktop Environment and GTK3 Theme There are a ton of updates to go over for this release, but the most in your face item that everyone is going to notice first are the changes to the desktop environment and theme. So let’s cover that first.
We are pleased to announce that our third release of 2019, Kali Linux 2019.3, is available immediately for download. This release brings our kernel up to version 5.2.9, and includes various new features across the board with NetHunter, ARM and packages (plus the normal bugs fixes and updates).
As promised in our roadmap blog post, there are both user facing and backend updates.
With our 2019.3 Kali release imminent, we wanted to take a quick moment to discuss one of our more significant upcoming changes: our selection of metapackages. These alterations are designed to optimize Kali, reduce ISO size, and better organize metapackages as we continue to grow.
Before we get into what’s new, let’s briefly recap what a metapackage is. A metapackage is a package that does not contain any tools itself, but rather is a dependency list of normal packages (or other metapackages). This allows us to group related tools together. For instance, if you want to be able to access every wireless tool, simply install the kali-tools-wireless metapackage. This will obtain all wireless tools in one download. As always, you can access the full list of metapackages available in Kali on kali.org/docs/general-use/metapackages/. If you prefer to use the command line, the following command will list out the packages that will be installed via a specific metapackage:
