Kali 2.0 Installation Tips for Macbook Pro 2015 Retina

[yzh503]

Hi all,

Kali 2.0 live USB does not really well support Macbook pro 2015 Retina. I've seen lots of people having problems like "black screen after booting from EFI", "got a very small freezing menu in the top left corner", and "Legacy bootloader not found". After a few days exploring, I suddenly found a solution to the booting issue, and now Kali 2.0 runs perfectly on my MBP 2015. The following are some tricks I did.

1. Booting problem
Step 1. Prepare 1 USB sticks and a free partition on your hard disk.

Step 2. Make a Kali live USB stick following link. http://docs.kali.org/downloading/kal...ve-usb-install

Step 3. On mac, in your USB drive, Open folders EFI - BOOT. Open syslinux.cfg with a text editor.

Step 4. Change “vesamenu.c32” to “menu.c32”. Save the file.

Step 5. Restart the computer, with the option key pressed.

Step 6. Choose the EFI option, which is your usb stick.

Step 7. Now the booting menu should not be freezing any more. Graphical install and install options should work. If this does not work for you, you may stop reading further.

2. Network device not detected
The installation wizard cannot identify ethernet card, so just continue without network configured. We will install the network driver later.

3. Network driver
Once you finish installing, boot into Kali, and you will see network device is missing. Type in terminal

ifconfig

There is only one "lo".

To fix this, download the firmware for macbook pro 2015 from here https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/ke...43602-pcie.bin

Copy the file into /lib/firmware/brcm

Reboot and you will see WiFi is working, but still has no network access.

Start the network manager by modifying configuration file.

root@kali:~# nano /etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf

Turn false to true

root@kali:~# /etc/init.d/network-manager restart

Reboot and WiFi should work. This may not work on Thunderbolt-Ethernet wired network.

4. Cannot boot into OSX
Step 1. Hold option when booting, and boot from Mac HD.
Step 2. Reinstall your rEFInd.
Step 3. Restart.