When I first used backtrack – I loved it. Because I felt it was a platform with which you could never stop learning stuff from. Networks, OS, hardware .. it was limitless in terms of potential for a person who had some elementary knowledge or os, networks etc.
With Kali – I have to admit that gnome kept me away from it... and i kept on fiddling with BTR2. I believe, for anything to be perceived well by a human, be food or technology, all or the maximum number of human senses should be invoked well. Touch, see,smell, hear and taste...except maybe smell & taste, the rest applies to an OS – keyboard responses from terminal, eye candy desktop, the startup tone – action response tones … etc
Since there is no point winging if you are not going to do anything about it... I decide to run my age old favorite fluxbox on kali ..
So, the following are a few actions we will do today
1. Remove grub or mimic its removal
2. Change the default grub wallpaper and boot resolution
3. Change apt-get source list and install a software manager
4. Get rid of GDM
5. Login with the traditional command line interface
6. Start x automatically on login
7. Change screen resolution
8. Setup fluxbox as the default WM on login.
This is what I wanted to get to.
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1. Setting up your environment
- Your VM I would recommend has 2 cores and around 1200 RAM alloted to it with 25 GB disk.
- Network – autodetect
- Update your source.list to look like the following
Code:
#deb cdrom:[Debian GNU/Linux 7.0 _Kali_ - Official Snapshot amd64 LIVE/INSTALL Binary 20130327-17:54]/ kali contrib main non-free
#deb cdrom:[Debian GNU/Linux 7.0 _Kali_ - Official Snapshot amd64 LIVE/INSTALL Binary 20130327-17:54]/ kali contrib main non-free
## Security updates
# Line commented out by installer because it failed to verify:
deb http://http.kali.org/kali kali main contrib non-free
deb-src http://http.kali.org/kali kali main contrib non-free
deb http://security.kali.org/kali-security kali/updates main contrib non-free
deb-src http://security.kali.org/kali-security kali/updates main contrib non-free
- Run apt-get update and then apt-get upgrade. This will take a while
- Install synaptic (apt-get install synaptic)
- Install software-center if you want (apt-get install software-center)
- if you dont like the away synaptic looks in your environment (I didnt either) – download and install lxapperance to make changes (apt-get install lxapperance) – to change default fonts – would recommend gnome-tweak-tool
- Install open-vm-tool by apt-get install open-vm-tools. (forget the vmware tools)
- Run apt-get install xserver-xorg-input-vmmouse to fix your mouse movements and reboot
- Kali Documentation : http://docs.kali.org/general-use/ins...ols-kali-guest
2. Getting Fluxbox into the picture
- Download fluxbox from http://fluxbox.org/download/
- extract the tar file and cd into to run and run - ./configure ; make ; make install
- Reboot and choose fluxbox from for your session in gdm
- Choose your theme – I choose zimeck-darkblue. You can find a lot more of them from the fluxbox site
- customize your gnome-terminal to have
- No tabs
- font as terminus 10
- uncheck allow bold text
- uncheck menubar by default
- change cursor shape to underline.
- Colors – Green on black and palette scheme – tango
- tranparent background to your levels
- disable scrolbar and enable unlimited scrollback and scroll on output or keystroke
- save close and restart gnome-terminal.
- Download the wallpaper you want as set it up using fbsetbg -c wallpaper name
3. Change grub look and feel
- Download an image you want to setup as grub wallpaper and replace the /usr/share/images/desktop-base/desktop-grub.png with it. Remember it needs to be in the png format is what I found.
- download startupmanager – a gui tool to change grub configuration and rebuilt it apt-get install startupmanager
- run startupmanager and change the following
- timeout in seconds to 0
- display resolution to 1024x768 and colour depth to 24
- uncheck show boot splash and ensure show text during boot is enabled
- in the advanced tab change resolution to 1024x768
- What this will do is not let your choose an option during load and start the system straightaway at a higher resolution and change the default wallpaper.
4. Changing init services and startx
- download and install the following
- xinit – apt-get install xinit
- sysv-rc-conf – apt-get install sysv-rc-conf
- run sysv-rc-conf to stop gdm during startup (tab to uncheck and 'q' after to exit). What this will not do is remove gdm from startup and drop you on a simple login prompt on the whole screen. Feels very retro and much appealing to me.
- Post login to make sure fluxbox starts with fluxbox at the right resolution create a .xinitrc file and add the following
- xrandr -s 1440x900
- startfluxbox
- run startx and you will have your flux.
- If you want fluxbox to startup automatically after you login at the command prompt, create a .bash_login file in your home directory and add startx to it.
- With .bash_login and .xinitrc in place, after your login startx will be invoked which will invoke fluxbox.
Additional tools I found useful were
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- fbrun (as fbrun -bg black -fg white -title "Enter Command" -w 500 -h 25 in your fluxmenu as “Execute..”)
- geany as the editor (apt-get install geany)
- xfe as the file manager (apt-get install xfe)
- libreoffice (use synaptic)
- claws mail for your mails
- a good usb network adapter.
