The NanoPC-T3 has an Samsung S5P6818, Octa Core Cortex™-A53 (ARMv8 64-bit) processor and either 1GB or 2GB DDR3 RAM. The NanoPC-T3 has an 8GB eMMC, which is too small for a default Kali installation, so we run from an external microSD card.

By default, the Kali Linux NanoPC-T3 image contains the kali-linux-default metapackage similar to most other platforms. If you wish to install extra tools please refer to our metapackages page.

If you’re unfamiliar with the details of downloading and validating a Kali Linux image, or for using that image to create a bootable device, it’s strongly recommended that you refer to the more detailed procedures described in the specific articles on those subjects.

To install a pre-built image of the standard build of Kali Linux on your NanoPC-T3, follow these instructions:

1. Get a fast microSD card with at least 16GB capacity. Class 10 cards are highly recommended.
2. Download and validate the Kali NanoPC-T3 image from the downloads area. The process for validating an image is described in more detail on Downloading Kali Linux.
3. Use the dd utility to image this file to your microSD card (same process as making a Kali USB.

In our example, we assume the storage device is located at /dev/sdX. Do not simply copy these value, change this to the correct drive path.

$ xzcat kali-linux-2024.3-nanopc-t-arm64.img.xz | sudo dd of=/dev/sdX bs=4M status=progress

This process can take a while, depending on your PC, your microSD card’s speed, and the size of the Kali Linux image.

Once the dd operation is complete, boot up the NanoPC-T3 with the microSD card plugged in.

You should be able to log in to Kali.

The NanoPC-T3 will attempt to boot from the microSD card first if one is plugged in.

The wireless chipset is an Ampak AP6212, which is a rebranded Cypress (formerly Broadcom) Wireless card, so enterprising users may be able to get nexmon working, if the work was put in.

If you want to change boot arguments/the kernel command line, you will need to install the package libubootenv-tool then create a file env.conf with the boot arguments you want to use. The default is console=ttySAC0,115200n8 root=/dev/mmcblk0p2 rootfstype=ext3 rootwait rw consoleblank=0 net.ifnames=0\nbootdelay 1 and then write it to the sdcard with fw_setenv /dev/mmcblk0 -s env.conf

If you want to customize the Kali NanoPC-T3 image, including changes to the packages being installed, changing the desktop environment, increasing or decreasing the image file size or generally being adventurous, check out the Kali-ARM Build-Scripts repository on GitLab, and follow the README.md file’s instructions. The script to use is nanopc-t.sh.