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:
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!
We love the Raspberry Pi, and judging by the response we got to a late night tweet we sent out last weekend a lot of you love the Pi too!
Because of that, when the Pi 4 dropped we wanted to get Kali supported on it right away.
What’s new on the Raspberry Pi 4? The Raspberry Pi 4 is actually a pretty amazing little machine. The Pi has always been known for its low cost and easy accessibility, but with the 4 we can actually throw real performance onto that list as well.
DigitalOcean is a cloud provider similar to AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and many others. They offer instances, called “droplets”, with different Linux distributions such as Debian, Ubuntu, FreeBSD, etc. Similar to AWS, DigitalOcean has datacenters around the world and sometimes multiple datacenters in each country.
However, one feature in particular sets them apart them from their competitors. A little while ago, they added support for custom images, which allows users to import virtual machine disks and use them as droplets. This is perfect for us as we can use our own version of Kali Linux in their cloud.
Now that our 2019.2 release is out, we thought we would take this opportunity to cover some of the changes and new features we have coming to Kali Linux in the following year. Normally, we only really announce things when they are ready to go public, but a number of these changes are going to impact users pretty extensively so we wanted to share them early.
Kali Linux has had support for WSL for some time, but its usefulness has been somewhat limited. This was mostly due to restrictions placed on some system calls , most importantly those revolving around networking. Furthermore, additional issues with speed, specifically I/O, were also problematic. Because of this, Kali WSL has mostly been relegated to reporting functions after an assessment is completed. A cool technology, and certainly an amazing engineering feat, but as is, it just was not that useful in the field.
Welcome to our second release of 2019, Kali Linux 2019.2, which is available for immediate download. This release brings our kernel up to version 4.19.28, fixes numerous bugs, includes many updated packages, and most excitingly, features a new release of Kali NetHunter!
Kali NetHunter 2019.2 Release Thanks to the tireless contributions from the vibrant NetHunter community led by @Re4son, @binkybear, @fattire, @jmingov, @jcadduono, @Kimocoder, and @PaulWebSec, NetHunter now supports over 50 devices running all the latest Android versions, from KitKat through to Pie. To celebrate this milestone, we have released 13 new NetHunter images for the latest Android versions of our favourite devices, including:
Welcome to our first release of 2019, Kali Linux 2019.1, which is available for immediate download. This release brings our kernel up to version 4.19.13, fixes numerous bugs, and includes many updated packages.
Tool Upgrades The big marquee update of this release is the update of Metasploit to version 5.0, which is their first major release since version 4.0 came out in 2011:
