Kali Mate Not Booting into GUI and Networking Not Starting

Hi,

I have used XFCE and Gnome versions of Kali without any issues. They install and work fine.

I recently tried both Kali 2016.2 Mate and Kali 2017 W13 Mate, but both boot into a command prompt login (showing runlevel 5) and then when I use "startx" to boot into GUI mode the networking is not working. I have to "service networking start" and "dhclient eth0" to get it going. I fully upgraded the system hoping that would fix an issue, but still boots into a command prompt and after started networking isn't started. When I look at dmesg, I do not see anything that would indicate an issue.

I am using VMware Workstation Pro 12.5 on a Dell XPS 13. I have installed a lot of distros and haven't had an issue like this. Not sure what is going on.

Thanks,
Shawn

Having the same exact problem with Mate, every other desktop works just fine except the one I wanna use, lol...

Quote:

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Originally Posted by shawnthor

Hi,

I have used XFCE and Gnome versions of Kali without any issues. They install and work fine.
I recently tried both Kali 2016.2 Mate and Kali 2017 W13 Mate, but both boot into a command prompt login ...
Shawn

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Hello all, first post.

Similar problems.

Install and you boot to a TTY.
Login as root, create a user. (perhaps adduser drop_kick sudo...)
Login as user, the first time, and a normal Mate desktop is there.
The networking is not. Open term, call:
service smbd start (sudo helps) and
sudo dhclient -v
will get the networking going.
The next time you login, the desktop background is black, and changes to the background colour have no effect, and selecting a different wallpaper has no effect.
In some cases the OS will learn about the network and you don't need to manually start samba and request a new IP each time, but in other cases you do. But in ALL cases, after the first login, the desktop wall paper (the nice Kali dragon) goes missing in action.
If you add a new user, their first login will feature the Kali dragon and everything works, but the 2nd...
I did install from the 2016.2 and the problem seemed worse. I made a 2nd VM and installed from the 2017.1 and that's a little better, but the desktop is still broken, and so is the graphic login. It's all TTY and startx.

This is not a MAJOR complaint. If you are a penetration tester, I'd expect you to know what a TTY is, and how to restart a network session - but it would be nice if the desktop worked, and the network settings which worked last time, were remembered and set for the next boot. I like the Kali dragon. The distro has far less sheer kewel appeal if the backgrounds don't work... The Kali background is a classic. The best has less appeal without her.

Here there be fixes.

The issue is basically that A.) there does not seem to be a display/login manager (hence needing to run startx) and B.) as kneedragon1962 pointed out you need to get the network stack working.

A.) Install a display manager:

Could be as simple as apt-get install gdm3 but the choice of display manager is up to you. Check the bottom link for a comparison.

https://unix.stackexchange.com/quest...can-i-fix-this

https://unix.stackexchange.com/quest...op-environment

https://www.slant.co/topics/2053/~linux-display-manager

B.) Configure your network device:

Edit /etc/network/interfaces and add an auto entry for your device. Mine looks like this:

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp

You can also set it up to do a static IP if you want:

https://www.howtoforge.com/linux-bas...c-ip-on-ubuntu

Guide is for Ubuntu but applies here.