Downloads
- VirtualBox (Free, Open-source hypervisor)
- Under “VirtualBox Platform Packages”, choose your operating system. A download should initiate.
- Kali Linux (Penetration Testing OS)
- Be sure to download the VirtualBox 64bit version labeled “Recommended”.
- 7zip (or any other unarchiver that supports 7z)
- Download and install here:
Pre-requisites
- Ensure virutalization is enabled within your computer BIOS.
- Virtualization allows us to run different operating systems within our normal computer environment!
- You can check if you have virtualization enabled by opening “Task Manager” (Keybind: Ctrl+Shift+Esc) on your computer and navigating to the “Performance” tab. From here, there will be a section titled “Virtualization” that will either say “Enabled” or “Disabled”.
- If disabled, follow the tutorial below. It might be helpful to take a photo of the instructions before attempting as you will not be able to access them if you forget midway! :)
Installation
- After downloading the installer for VirtualBox, proceed to launch the downloaded executable titled similarly to “Oracle VM VirtualBox <version#>. At the time of writing, the VirtualBox version is 7.0.10.
- Setup
- After downloading and installing the VirtualBox software, you should be greeted with a page resembling the below photo. If your screen looks radically different from the one below, you may need to click “Tools” in the top left of your screen. (Highlighted in Blue in the image below). Additionally, if you have not used this software before, you will not have any Virtual Machines listed as you see below. (Do not worry 😉, we’ll get there!)
- At this time, we will have to unzip the downloaded Kali Linux file. To do this, navigate to the directory that you downloaded the Kali Linux file in, right-click the file, and unzip (Extract). This can take a couple of minutes. After doing so, you should be left with a folder labeled “kali-linux 2023.2-virtualbox-amd64” (or something similar). Inside this folder should be 2 files shown below.
- Double-click on the file ending with the extension “.vbox”. This should launch another instance of VirtualBox and automatically create a new Virtual Machine.
- Finally, your VirtualBox window should look something like this:
- Most people prefer to make more RAM available to their VM to increase the responsiveness and overall speed of it. If you’re not sure about this optional step, there’s nothing wrong with skipping it! To do this, we can click the “Settings” cog wheel at the top of our window.
- From this window, we can now see all the settings we can change for our virtual machine. The option we are most interested in is the “System” tab. After switching to this tab, we can see that we have an option for “Base Memory”. It is helpful to make yourself familiar with the number of Gigabytes of RAM your computer has. However many gigabytes of RAM you would like to allocate to your VM, multiply that value by 1024. This will give you the value of megabytes to input into the settings. The most common values are below for easy reference. (BE SURE TO LEAVE A COUPLE OF GIGABYTES (2-4 GB) FOR YOUR COMPUTER TO FUNCTION.) For example, I have 16 GB of RAM in my laptop, I usually allocate 6-8 GB to my virtual machines to put a little more pep in their step.
- 2 GB - 2048 MB
- 4 GB - 4096 MB
- 6 GB - 6144 MB
- Now we can finally launch our VM! When you’re ready, click the “Start” arrow at the top of the window. This will create a new window and initiate the booting of your virtual machine.
If your OS won’t inflate .7z archives, download and install 7zip (linked above)
Once you’re happy with the value you chose, click “OK” to confirm the changes you made. You can always come back and change this value to increase or decrease the amount of allocated RAM.
First Boot
- After booting the Virtual Machine, you will be greeted with a boot screen that gives your 5 seconds to make a choice as to what you’d like to boot to. We do not have to manually choose any option, so we’ll wait until the 5-second countdown is finished.
- Next, we should be welcomed by a Kali Linux login screen that looks similar to the one below. (Wallpapers could be different).
- The default username and password for this Kali machine are both “kali”. After entering these credentials, click “Log In” or click Enter.
- Congratulations! You have successfully installed your Kali Linux virtual machine!
- Its common practice after installing a new Virtual Machine to open a terminal window and run the commands below.
# ATTENTION: The sudo password should be "kali"
# Run to recieve package updates
> sudo apt update
# After that is finished, run the command below to install the new updates
# (THIS COULD TAKE A WHILE SINCE THIS IS A NEW VM INSTANCE)
> sudo apt upgrade 