From the course: Introduction to Kali Linux for Penetration Testing and Ethical Hacking

Starting with Kali - Linux Tutorial

From the course: Introduction to Kali Linux for Penetration Testing and Ethical Hacking

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Starting with Kali

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- [Narrator] Kali is the latest evolution of what started out as a security testing suite called backtrack. It runs on a wide range of hardware and is used extensively by professional security testers. Kali is a Linux distribution, which includes over 300 security testing tools and a graphical interface to make using the testing tools easier. A significantly different version of Kali has been introduced in 2020. It has a new look graphical interface and uses the Kali Kali user accounts rather than the original route tour route accounts. Firstly, we can see this as a virtual machine with its virtual box menu at the top left and with status indicators for the bottom right. We don't need to use these right now, so, we'll get straight into looking at Kali. The Kali main screen has an active bar at the top with Kali tool icons at the left and system icons at the rides. Let's check out the system icons first. We can see the time display and if we click on it, we get a calendar popup. If we hover over the next icon, we can see the status of our network connection. We're connected on a virtual wide connection 1. We can see an audio icon next and we can use this to adjust volume. The next icon I have is notifications, and if we click this, we can adjust the notification settings. I'll enable, do not disturb. The next icon is for system settings, and allows us to set presentation mode and to change the power settings. If we click on power manager settings and then select the system tab, we can see that we never suspend due to an activity, this is my preferred setting. If we select the display tab, we can see that we have a five minute blank screen, a 10 minutes sleep time and the 15 minute power off. I'll drop these all to never and switch off display power management as I don't need it. The security tab has an auto lock when the screen saver is activated, which is fine, okay, I can close this now. The padlock icon is the screen lock, which will not be using. The power button allows us to manage our session with the two main options we're interested in being restart and shut down. The left hand side of the screen has three panels. The first is the Kali application menu. The second is our favorite icons and the third shows the workspaces, we'll look at these shortly. If we right click on the main panel, a context menu pops up. The first item is opening new window, which is a shortcut to the file manager. We can see that we have the main file system and the file share which I configured in virtual box. We have some key folders and then we can browse the network. Our home directory is Kali. I'll leave the file manager for the moment. There's a couple of useful shortcuts here, which we can use. Open terminal here we'll do just that, opening a terminal for the command line input. Note that this opens as we would expect in the desktop folder. We can go to our home folder using the tilde. Okay, I'll close this for the moment. The other useful shortcut is the applications menu, which is similar to the menu we get if we click on the icon at the left of the top bar, this menu allows us to run a program, open a terminal window, browse files, change our settings or in any of the applications in the Kali menu, starting at 01 to 42. Notice as we go down the Kali top level menus, we get a second and sometimes third level menu appear. The final thing I'll do is to remove the default shortcut icons from my screen by right clicking on the screen, selecting desktop settings, selecting the icons tab and deselecting the default items.

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