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.
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.
Throughout the history of Kali (and its predecessorsBackTrack, 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).
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:
Kali NetHunter has been undergoing a ton of changes of late. Now supporting over 50 devices and running on Android devices from KitKat (v4.4) to Pie (v9.0), its amazing the extra capabilities that have been introduced.
But, we don’t want to stop there. After a ton of work, we are really excited to introduce the Kali NetHunter App Store!
