So what's wrong with the standard MATE build? Well, one thing is that a display manager is not installed (resulting in a text mode login, then you have to run startx manually). Also airmon-ng doesn't work out of the box because of missing packages. And lastly, there is no network manager. These are easy to fix.
# Setup
apt-get install -y live-build debootstrap
git clone git://git.kali.org/live-build-config.git
cd live-build-config/
# Add missing packages
echo "" >> kali-config/variant-mate/package-lists/kali.list.chroot
echo usbutils >> kali-config/variant-mate/package-lists/kali.list.chroot
echo ieee-data >> kali-config/variant-mate/package-lists/kali.list.chroot
echo wavemon >> kali-config/variant-mate/package-lists/kali.list.chroot
echo network-manager-gnome >> kali-config/variant-mate/package-lists/kali.list.chroot
# Fix autologin and startx
unzip ~/Attachment 1002 -d kali-config/common/includes.chroot
# Make ISO
./build.sh --distribution sana --variant mate --verbose --arch i386
The Kali docs say go get a cup of coffee while the image builds. I say go do something that lasts over 3.5 hours, because that's how long it takes on my P4! Also, about 3GB of packages will be downloaded. So if you make one little change and rebuild, the cache is cleared and there goes another 3GB. You can eliminate the repeated downloads by removing the --purge option in the build.sh script.
