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
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3. Set name, protocol, host port and guest port
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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
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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