Kali/Annoyances

List of Annoyances

A list of annoyances in Kali, by topic, and hopefully a fix for each annoyance.

Also see Kali Raspberry Pi/Post-Install.

Kali Installs X on Raspberry Pi

Raspberry Pi image for Kali installs all manner of irrelevant, unnecessary, bloated crap. After doing an apt-get dist-upgrade, now I have a bunch of Apache services installed and running? I have a desktop X server running? Are you kidding me?? This is a headless server. WTF is it installing X by default for?

Fix:

$ apt-get remove -y apache2 xfce4 xfwm4
$ apt-get -y autoremove

Of course, the REAL fix is to create your own Kali ARM image, or go with an alternative distribution.

See Kali/Custom ARM Image for custom Kali ARM image.

See DietPi for alternative RPi distribution that is both lightweight AND has wifi support built in. Since that's the whole freaking point. Lightweight, headless server with a wifi dongle.

Other distributions for the Raspberry Pi: http://elinux.org/RPi_Distributions

Network manager

On Kali, specifically the desktop, NetworkManager automatically remembers and connects to wireless networks. What is this dumb, I can't, what idiot, stupid, dumb decision, I don't even know. Whoever decided to turn that one on should go jump off a bridge.

Solution: disable this obnoxious piece of crap. (Note that before you do this you should have your ethernet/wireless configured correctly, so that you won't lock yourself out of your device - see below).

$ systemctl stop NetworkManager.service
$ systemctl disable NetworkManager.service

Better yet, remove it:

$ apt-get remove -y network-manager network-manager-gnome
$ apt -y autoremove

Before you perform the above commands, add the following information to your /etc/network/interfaces:

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp

This ensures that when you plug your ethernet cable into the port, your box will run through the usual DHCP requests and automatically get set up.

Vim Takes Forever To Open

Not sure if this is a problem with vimrc or what, but vim takes a full 4-5 seconds to open, every damn time. How is this even possible? How can you possibly bloat such a lightweight and fast piece of software? Did I somehow install emacs in my sleep and run alias vim='emacs'?

Hidden Networks

No way to join a hidden network without turning off network manager and resorting to linux wifi command line wpa supplicant crap.