What is the recommended way to keep Kali Linux up-to-date?

Hi everybody,

As per my understanding, Kali is now a pure rolling-release distro, it does not offer the choice between a rolling and a fixed as other distro may do, am I right?

I installed it as a Qemu guest (managed itself by GNS3 for that matter) and tried to update it the traditional way through apt-get update and apt-get upgrade.

After the end of the updating process, I lost a few icons from the launchbar. This was not a big deal, even if it was not very clean.

I then discovered that Beef (which appears to be one of the main software in Kali since its shortcut appears by default in the launchbar) could not start anymore. I know that a solution has already been suggested for this particular issue a few months ago (which by the way shows that this is not a new issue), but I don't like it since it relies on fetching Beef files directly from the upstream project's Git repository and if I use distro packages and a distribution like Kali it is precisely to avoid having to do such things.

I thought that maybe Beef was broken because I did an apt-get upgrade instead of an apt-get dist-upgrade and therefore the installation of some new Ruby libraries (for instance) was blocked.

I therefore launched an apt-get dist-upgrade and restarted... only to see that Kali itself was now unable to start. The boot process fails on an I/O error when trying to access fd0 block 0. It does not surprise me that the operation fails since there is no floppy drive. Here again I could try to workaround the issue by configuring Qemu to emulate one, but I have the impression I will just loose my time in repairing endless issues.

This update procedure just do not feel reliable to me. Therefore I'm wondering what is the correct way to keep Kali Linux up-to-date:

• Is Kali Linux designed to be used mainly as a live-CD, and therefore not to be updated between releases (in other words: if someone really needs some updates between say releases 2016.1 and 2016.2, then he can get them but he will have homework to do down the road to get things working)?
• Should the sources.list file be updated to fetch only security updates? Currently this file is set at its default value:
  Code:

  ---

  deb http://http.kali.org/kali kali-rolling main non-free contrib

  ---

• Or maybe the solution lies somewhere else?

Thank you by advance for your guidance on this subject!

I run 3 commands to keep Kali updated: apt-get update && apt-get upgrade (or dist-upgrade, depending on my needs) && openvas-feed-update

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by grid

I run 3 commands to keep Kali updated: apt-get update && apt-get upgrade (or dist-upgrade, depending on my needs) && openvas-feed-update

---

I'm curious why people would use apt-get nowadays

Code:

---

apt clean && apt update && apt -y upgrade && apt -y dist-upgrade && apt -y autoremove

---

Thanks for your answers,

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by grid

I run 3 commands to keep Kali updated: apt-get update && apt-get upgrade (or dist-upgrade, depending on my needs) && openvas-feed-update

---

And you confirm that you do not encounter any issue? Beef is working without trouble, no problem with the desktop, with the booting process, no need to tweak the system after the update to get things working?

When I looked around, I had the impression I was not the only one to encounter such kind of problems...

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by sml156

I'm curious why people would use apt-get nowadays

---

Maybe because aptitude is not available ;) ! While I see aptitude and its ability to automatically uninstall dependencies not needed anymore as a concrete progress, I actually do not see any major advantage in favour of apt (it sounds to me like a stripped down version of apt-get and apt-cache throwing away backward compatibility).

I've occasionally run into problems after running dist-upgrade: Beef died on me, so I had to do some research at beefproject.com to get the fix. Haven't seen any issues with the desktop, booting, etc. I'm running on a Lenovo ThinkPad L530: dual booting with Windows 7. Before I upgrade, I check bugs.kali.org to see the outstanding issues; that helps me decide between running upgrade vs dist-upgrade.

@sml156...just the way I've always run updates on linux :)

After I upgraded my system the application icons are not showing, they just show the default icon for applications in linux, the gear in a square. For example the metasploit framework icon is not showing, mdk3 icon is not showing etc, but they work fine. Is there anyway to get those icons back?