Kali is a great learning tool for learning cybersecurity, especially the red-attacking side of it.
For the longest time, I had trouble running the Kali VM on my rather old Thinkpad X1 Carbon, as the image consumes quite a few resources.
There is a way to use most of Kali’s tools with little resource consumption: ssh into the image via your distro terminal.
It turns out it’s quite easy to set this up in VirtualBox, as described in this article:
https://averagelinuxuser.com/ssh-into-virtualbox/#install-ssh-in-virtualbox-os
Steps:
1. Download the latest Kali VirtualBox VM from https://www.kali.org/get-kali/#kali-virtual-machines
2. Go to the machine settings, network, port forwarding
3. Set name, protocol, host port and guest port
4. Open the terminal in the VM and enable SSH access
systemctl enable ssh --now
5. Open your system terminal and connect via SSH by the chosen port
The VM can be left open on the login screen.
This will consume a lot less resources to run the image and keep the option to run the GUI options in the Kali VM if needed.
Happy hacking!
References:
- Average Linux User (2022). How to SSH into VirtualBox machine. Available at: https://averagelinuxuser.com/ssh-into-virtualbox/#install-ssh-in-virtualbox-os (Accessed 10 January 2024)
- Kali Downloads page: https://www.kali.org/get-kali/#kali-virtual-machines