I am trying to side boot kali onto a MacBook Air with an M2 processor, every time I try the file vault that is enabled automatically on the system will not let me access files on the device, can anyone think of a workaround to side boot kali to read and copy but not effect the host machine in any way?
Macs use the APFS filesystem type, so in disk utility you can create another APFS volume on the 'disk' that you can then use how you wish, it will take the space you allocate from the free drive space available on the main storage of the Mac so if you just need storage space on the Mac that will do it, you can later format the space however you wish, even from a live Linux USB
If you want a bootable 'second drive' with Kali installed, then you will need to install a different bootloader to be able to choose between Mac OSX or Kali at boot, refind is usually the easiest to set up;
https://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/
You may well find that some hardware drivers for the Mac's devices are simply not available if you want to go this root.
Personally, I would just use Virtual box or VMWare and run Kali as a VM and use an external USB WiFi adapter if I need the WiFi capability, then everything works, no problematic driver issues, and you can drag and drop files between the host and VM without issue and save files in the VM itself.
I use VMWare on my Mac and have several VM's installed, Kali, Windows, etc essentially I can spin these up and use my Mac as a pentest lab if I want to play with exploits etc that I may not want on a live system, and if it breaks, I just reboot back to the last snapshot with no harm done, great learning tool.
A full Kali install with 'everything' sits at about 28 GB if I remember correctly, so I set my VM drive at 40GB
I am working on a project that requires me to be able to liveboot to any mac with a m2 processor. this is an ongoing IT Project for my college. thanks for pointing the way. do you know of any other bootloaders that can be used?Quote:
Originally Posted by Fred Sheehan
I don't have an M chipped mac, but I know that Apple at present, still uses Broadcom WiFi chipsets, and these require both drivers to be loaded as a Linux kernel module, and also firmware for the chipset itself.
Broadcom are 'softmac' chipsets, so only half of it is created in hardware, the other half is the firmware/drivers needed to make it complete.
The Broadcom reversed firmware is available from the main Debian repos, but you typically have to compile the kernel modules yourself. It's because Broadcom is 'closed source', and so drivers and firmware are rarely added 'out of the box' in any Linux distro, let alone Kali.
At least you have the physical 'F' buttons and not a software driven taskbar, that is a real pain point on a Mac for Linux.
refind is the best and most configurable bootloader you can use on a Mac for multi booting, and it is reversable if you no longer want it, it doesn't overrite the Apple boot set up, just writes its own, and changes it to be the default boot environment, so it can be changed back if needed.
If you just needed a 'Live Boot' Linux environment, the easiest 'just works' on a USB that is Mac compatible, is usually Fedora. All of your hardware should just work without you needing to do anything, and all of the tools that you use in Kali can be easily added to Fedora too, in fact they even do a 'Security Lab' Fedora version that has most of it already installed for you!
https://labs.fedoraproject.org/
Or there is an ongoing project to make Linux fully support Apple Silicon;
https://asahilinux.org/