The Raspberry Pi 1 is a low-cost, credit-card-sized ARM computer. Despite being a being less powerful than a “standard” laptop or desktop PC, its affordability makes it an excellent option for a tiny Linux system. The Raspberry Pi 1 provides a full-size SD card slot for mass storage and will attempt to boot off that device when the board is powered on.

By default, the Kali Linux Raspberry Pi 1 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 Raspberry Pi, the general process goes as follows:

1. Get a fast full-size SD card with at least 16GB capacity. Class 10 cards are highly recommended.
2. Download and validate the Kali Linux Raspberry Pi 1 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 full-size SD 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-raspberry-pi1-armel.img.xz | sudo dd of=/dev/sdX bs=4M status=progres

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

Once the dd operation is complete, boot up the Raspberry Pi 1 with the full-size SD card plugged in.

You should be able to log in to Kali.

There is no wireless on the Raspberry Pi, so you will need to use an external device for wireless.

If you want to customize the Kali Raspberry Pi 1 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 raspberry-pi1.sh.