Kali Linux enables amateurs and pros alike to take security into their own hands and carry out attacks on their own networks and equipment.

We’re not going to suggest that you use Kali Linux as your daily driver. We could, as it’s a perfectly serviceable as a distro, but there are some caveats. Kali is a specialist project and is heavily geared towards spoiling someone’s day, week, month or even their year. It’s designed with security in mind and developers deliberately keep the number of upstream repositories to a minimum. You may have a sudden urge to play some Steam games or add additional repositories to your sources.list, and while this is totally do-able in theory, you run a very real risk of nerfing your Kali Linux installation entirely.

Unless penetration testing is your God-given vocation, and you can dedicate a machine on which to execute your exploits without giving in to the temptations of adding any extra software, don’t run Kali on bare metal. While there are ready-to-roll VMWare and VirtualBox pre-built images, these take up a large and preset amount of storage. Instead, we’re going to suggest that you run Kali in a virtual machine with VirtualBox, and allocate a dynamic hard drive that expands to a predetermined limit as you fill it up.

Kali ISO images come in a range of sizes, the largest being a whopping 10GB containing everything you could possibly need to wreak mayhem and havoc on the world. Choosing the Everything option means you can experiment with all of Kali’s tools in an offline environment, as you don’t need to download anything else. You can connect to the local intranet, and away you go! This is probably a little overkill for most people, but we’ve never installed a 10GB ISO before, and wanted to see what it was like.