Quote Originally Posted by muts View Post
To build your own Kali ISO image with a custom Desktop Environment, start by following the build your own Kali ISO guide. Before building your ISO, edit config/package-lists/kali.list.chroot to contain the following entries to install the desktop environment of your choice:

To read the full document, check our Customize the Kali Desktop article.

If you have any issues with this procedure, please post them in this thread.


Thank you Muts for the quality info. I do however have one thing to add that would have saved me literally a handful of hours.

Make sure you have A LOT of disk space available.

I ran through the procedures and everything was cool aside from the two hour download of all the updated programs. I installed Kali in virtualbox and figured the finished ISO would be about the same size or smaller than the original ISO. SO guessed 18 GB would be sufficient. It wasn't and I had now spent 2 hours waiting for all the updates. Oh well, chalk that up to trial and error. I deleted the virtual disk and create 24 GB Virtual disk. I then started the hybrid.iso creation process and waited another 2 hours for downloads to finish. Only to find out that I still ran out of disk space. !!! *smashes head against wall*

Third time was a charm, I deleted the 24GB virtual disk and created a 34GB virtual drive. I woke up the next day and found my LXDE-Kali hybrid.ISO.

I tested the ISO and it works great "SO FAR".

Again, thank you for the quality links on how to change from gnome to a lighter weight OS.

But it would have been nice to know ahead of time how much disk space I would need to have available. This reply is simply here to hopefully let others know so they don't spend 6-7 hours downloading updated for no good reason.