Usually we use Virtual Machines on Windows and use Kali Linux there. But there are lots of Kali fans using Kali Linux directly (as a primary OS) on their PC. Here we sometime need to install virtual machine of other OS or vulnerable virtual machine.

We have already discussed a way where we had used KVM (Kernel Virtual Manager) in our Metasploitable2 and Windows installation in Linux. Al tough KVM has lots of functions but majority of people will chose VirtualBox because they are used to with VirtualBox.

Oracle VM VirtualBox is a free and open-source hosted hypervisor for x86 virtualization in this tutorial we describe how easily we can install VirtualBox in our Kali Linux system and use it.

First of all we need to go to the Linux download section of VirtualBox by clicking on this link. A new window will open like following screenshot:

In the above screenshot we can see that VirtualBox is not directly available for Kali. But the Ubuntu’s VirtualBox will work in Kali Linux and almost other Debian based distributions.

Now we download the VirtualBox for latest Ubuntu version. It is a .deb file with almost 85 MB of size.

After download the deb installer file on the Downloads folder we open the the terminal there and to install it we apply following command:

sudo dpkg -i virtualbox*.deb

Then it will start installing VirtualBox on our Kali Linux system.

After a little bit of time (depending on our computer’s performance) it will complete.

Now we can search the VirtualBox on the Application menu.

Now we click on this to open it. It will open in the following screenshot:

Now we can use it to configure any other OS under Kali Linux. This is how we can install VirtualBox in our Kali Linux machine and the installation process of other OS in it will be the same as we do it on Windows.

Using Kali Linux as primary OS ? Our daily life with Kali Linux might be interesting.

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In our some previous articles we discussed about some penetration testing labs, like PentestLab , DVWA where we can practice and improve our attacking skills. Practicing is very important, Practice makes perfect. In today’s article we are going to discuss about how to set SQLi lab on Kali Linux to test our SQL Injection skills. Advanced SQL Injection is still a major bug can be found on various sites. That because still learning and growing SQL Injection skills are profitable for cybersecurity experts and bug bounty hunters.

For this lab setup we are going to use SQLi_Edited, this is a upgraded fork of sqli-labs (Dhakkan Labs). Before cloning it from GitHub let we move to our /var/www/html directory, we are going to clone it there to make things easy.

cd /var/www/html

Here we need to clone the repository from GitHub by using following command:

sudo git clone https://github.com/Rinkish/Sqli_Edited_Version

In the following screenshot we can see that this repository is successfully cloned to the directory.

Now we can go inside this directory by using following command:

cd Sqli_Edited_Version

Here we use ls command to see all the files, as we can see in the following screenshot:

Here we can see the directory named “sqlilabs“, Now we move it on the previous directory and rename it for easy to open by applying following command:

sudo mv sqlilabs/ ../sqli

Then we back to our previous directory by using following command:

cd ..

We can see the process in the following screenshot:

Now we need to edit database credential file named “db-creds.inc“, which is located under “sqli/sql-connections/db-creds.inc” and put our user name and password for database. To edit it we are going to use infamous Linux text editor nano.

sudo nano sqli/sql-connections/db-creds.inc

In the following screenshot we can see the default configuration of it, where the database user is root and database password is blank.

Now we modify this as per our Kali Linux system user, here we are using user “kali” and we can also choose a password as we want, as shown in the following screenshot:

Now we save and close it by typing CTRL+X, then Y, then Enter ↲.

Now we need to setup our mySQL database for our Kali Linux system. MySQL comes preloaded with Kali Linux. We need to open up our MariaDB as root user by using following command:

sudo mysql -u root

Then we need to create our user with password, in our case our user will be ‘kali‘ and password will be ‘1234‘. So the command for us will be following:

CREATE USER 'kali'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY '1234';

Now our user is created as we can see in the following screenshot:

Now we need to grant all permission to user ‘kali‘ by using following command:

GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON *.* TO 'kali'@'localhost';

The screenshot of the above command is following:

Database setup is done, now we can exit from MariaDB by using CTRL+C keys and run following command to start our MySQL services:

sudo service mysql start

Our setup is almost complete now we need to run our apache2 server (comes pre-loaded with Kali). We start our Apache2 web server by using following command:

sudo service apache2 start

Now our web server is running, we can see it by navigating to localhost/sqli URL from our browser. Our SQL Injection lab will open in front of us as we can see in the following screenshot:

Here for the very first time we need to ‘Setup/reset database for labs’. After clicking there our database setup will start as we can see in the following screenshot:

Now a page will open up in our browser which is an indication that we can access different kinds of Sqli challenges, as we can see in the following screenshot:

Here we can solve various types of SQL injection challenges, by solving them our SQL Injection skill will be improved. For an example, to start the basic SQL Injection challenge we need to click on Lesson 1.

This is all for this article. We had learnt how we can create SQL Injection practice labs on our system and practice our SQL Injection skills from basics to advance.

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To perform wireless auditing we need some special WiFi adapters that supports monitor mode, packet injection and soft AP mode. Alfa cards are known for best quality and reliable. But Alfa card’s price is high for students.

In our this article we are going to cover a budget friendly TP-Link WiFi adapter that supports monitor mode, packet injection and soft AP. TP-Link AC600 is a perfect budget WiFi adapter for cybersecurity students. It also have supports of 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz bands on Kali Linux.

TP-Link AC600 comes with a 5dBi antenna which can rotate 180° to cover a long range. This WiFi adapter comes with RTL8821AU chipset which not supported on our Kali Linux (2022.1) directly. So if we plug it in via our system’s USB port, we will see nothing will happen. Ever we can’t see it’s network interface. Let’s configure it for our Kali Linux system.

Configuring TP-Link AC600 for Kali Linux

After plug it in with our system we check for our network interfaces by using following command:

iwconfig

In the following screenshot we can see that we cant see any external wireless network interface (in our case wlan0 is our inbuilt adapter).

Now we check connected devices on our USB via following command:

lsusb

The output sown in the following screenshot:

Here we can see our TP-Link adapter (highlighted) with the chipset. It means it connected but we need to install drivers for it. Before installing drivers we need to make sure that we are using a updated version of Kali Linux.

To install TP-Link AC600 driver on our updated Kali Linux we just need to run following command:

sudo apt install realtek-rtl88xxau-dkms

The following screenshot shows the output of above command:

In the above screenshot we can see the output of our applied command. After installing the driver it also not gonna work. What we need ? Yes we need a reboot. Lets reboot our system.

After the reboot we can check again our network interfaces by using following command:

iwconfig

We can see the result in the following screenshot:

Now we can see the wlan1 interface which is our TP-Link AC600 adapter. In the above screenshot we can notice that the mode is managed. We can change it to monitor mode by using following commands one by one:

sudo airmon-ng check kill

sudo airmon-ng start wlan1

Now we check if the monitor mode is started or not by using following command:

iwconfig

The following screenshot shows the output of the above commands.

We can see that our wlan1 interface now have Monitor Mode (highlighted). Now lets check if it is working or not. To do so we need to run following command:

sudo airodump-ng wlan1

In the following screenshot we can see that we are searching for target WiFi.

So, it’s time to check for the packet injection is working perfectly or not by using following command:

sudo aireplay-ng --test wlan1

In the following screenshot we can see that packet injection is also working fine.

Let we check for softAP mode by using following command:

sudo airbase-ng -a xx.xx.xx.xx.xx.xx --essid "ESSID" -c 12 wlan1

We can choose any BSSID (in above example x refers to any number) and ESSID on the above command -c is for specify a channel. We can see the output in the following screenshot:

In the above screenshot we can see that we have started a soft AP on 01:02:03:04:05:06 BSSID, and the ESSID is Kali_Tutorials on channel 12 with our wlan1 interface. Now we can see a wireless network around us using other devices on our given ESSID.

We left one more thing that TP-Link AC600 supports dual band and our previous all the examples were on 2.4 Ghz, so how we can work with 5Ghz.

Let’s check for 5Ghz support, but we can’t scan 5Ghz networks using aircrack-ng so we run following command to scan 5Ghz networks using TP-Link AC600:

sudo airodump-ng --band a wlan1

In the following screenshot we can see 5Ghz networks around us:

Now we can also see iwconfig to see our network interfaces and in the following screenshot:

We can see in the above screenshot that our wlan1 is on 5Ghz.

Extra Talks

TP-Link AC600 is a very good affordable WiFi adapter for penetration testing students, not just only pocket friendly, it has quality also. It supports 5Ghz band with monitor mode, packet injection and soft AP. These things makes it very competitive with other adapters (especially Alfa cards).

This is how we can use TP-Link AC600 on our Kali Linux and use for Wireless auditing.

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There are so many users recently switched in Kali Linux from Windows, some of them and they want to run Windows programs and games in Kali Linux. So in our today’s tutorial we will describe how to run Windows programs and games in Kali Linux.

We can easily do this via wine. Wine is a program by using it we can run Windows programs in Linux environment (Linux, macOS, & BSD). The full from of wine is Wine Is Not an Emulator. Really it is not an emulator or virtual machine, wine translates Windows API calls into POSIX calls on-the-fly, eliminating the performance and memory penalties of other methods and allowing us to cleanly integrate Windows applications into our desktop.

How to Install Wine in Kali Linux

In our Kali Linux system we can install wine by simply using following command:

sudo apt-get install wine

The following screenshot shows that we already have wine’s latest version.

Wine is already installed in our case

We can’t run it now, we need another tool that is called wine-32. Wine-32 requires for 32 bit packages but it is necessary to run wine tool.

We can install wine32 by simply using apt-get install command but first we need to add 32 bit architecture in our machine. To do this we use following command:

sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386

After this we need to update our system for new architecture’s repository by applying following command:

sudo apt-get update

Then we can install wine32 in our system, so we run the apt-get command:

sudo apt-get install wine32

It may take some minutes depending on our internet speed and system performance. Then it will ask for restarting some libraries, we click here yes(Tab key might be useful). Then after completing the process we restart/reboot our PC.

Then we need to configure our wine to run Windows applications. To do that we open wine configuration by applying command:

winecfg

It will open the configuration window of wine. As shown in  the following screenshot:

Here we can configure wine. We can set Windows version, Libraries, Graphics, Audio, Drivers, Audio etc, but for now we leave these on default configuration. 

Run Windows Application in Kali Linux

Now we are all set to run Windows applications and games in Kali Linux. We just need to type wine name-of-installer.exe in terminal.

For an example we are going to install notepad++ in our Kali Linux.

We need to open our terminal where the notepad++ setup file or exe file stored (In our case it’s in our /Downloads directory, as we can see the directory in the following screenshot) and type following command:

wine npp.7.8.8.Installer.x64.exe

Then it will start it’s installing process and we can complete it as we do in Windows OS, as we can see in the following screenshot.

After complete installation during the funny next next way (Windows installation process LMAO) we check on create desktop icon and we got notepad++ icon on our desktop.

Notepad++ on Kali Linux Desktop

Now we can launch Notepad++ from directly our desktop. Isn’t it really cool ??

We also can start it from Application Menu>Wine>Programs>Notepad++

Now if we want that we don’t wanna use terminal and we need to open every exe file through wine directly. We just skip the terminal then we need to set wine program loader as default for exe files. We need to create a symbolic link of it. To do it we use following command:

sudo ln -s /usr/share/doc/wine/examples/wine.desktop /usr/share/applications

Then the link will be created, now we need to set it default for all exe files. To do so we right click on any exe file and choose “open with another application”.

Now we scroll down very lower (or we can press wine on our keyboard) to find “Wine Windows Program Loader”. We need to select it and must check ✅ on the box “Use as default for this kind of file” as we did in the following screenshot:

Then we need to click on open. After this point our system will open every exe file via wine as default.

This is how we can install any application in Kali Linux such as Adobe Photoshop, Microsoft Office. Nowadays we can run latest versions of Windows programs in Linux even we can install Adobe Photoshop CS 2020.

Wine creates file systems like Windows in our home directory but it is a hidden directory. Anyways we have opened it in the next screenshot.

Here we can see the file system is just like Windows. Wine creates an entire system like Windows that’s why we can run Windows application in Linux, not like virtual machine or emulator they creates another virtual system inside our system.

Additional Wine

Another tool is called “Winetricks”, it helps us to install various Windows games, application, dll libraries, fonts etc.

Lets install Winetricks by using following command:

sudo apt-get install winetricks

This is a very small tool should install in some seconds.

After installing it we run this tool by using following command:

winetricks

After this the menu opens like the following screenshot:

From here we can easily install application, games and much more things.

Here is some winetricks applications list. We can see MS Office versions here. The MS Office 2013 is available for direct download via winetricks.

Conclusion

This is how we can install & run Wine in our Kali Linux system and install Windows applications and games in Kali Linux. Found it useful? Make sure to follow us on Twitter and GitHub, we post article updates there. To join our KaliLinuxIn family, join our Telegram Group. We are trying to build a community for Linux and Cybersecurity. For anything we always happy to help everyone on the comment section. As we know our comment section is always open to everyone. We read each and every comment and we always reply.

Which Windows application should be installed first ? Please let us know in the comment section. We are curious to know. For any kind of problem and suggestion please leave a comment we always reply.

We have already shows some awesome looks of Kali Linux in our this article. But this article is going to be interesting, because we are going to give our Kali Linux a proper macOS look.

Here we are using Kali Linux 2020.3 primary installation with lightdm display manager. We need to configure lots of things so this article will be full with screenshots and might be lengthy but every step will be useful so we need to have patience. After doing all the process our Kali looks like following screenshot.

Yes, This is Kali Linux not macOS

First of all we need to update & upgrade our Kali by using sudo apt update and sudo apt upgrade. We update our machine every morning it’s a good practice.

Configuring the Font

Okey, first we need to set our font. We are going to use “Noto sans regular” font in our system but we have to download this font from Google fonts. Now we download this font by clicking on “Download family” as shown in the following screenshot.

It will download a zip file before extracting it we open our file manager with root permissions. So we run following command:

sudo thunar

This will ask our sudo password. Then we can see thunar file manager with root access, then we need to right click on zip file and select ‘Extract Here’ option, as shown in the following screenshot:

Now we open the extracted folder and see some files. We just need the ‘Noto sans regular’ file so we copy it then we go to the directory /usr/share/fonts/X11 and paste it there. This copy and pasting job will not possible without root accessed file manager.

Now we need to choose the font on our settings. We open our settings manager.

Then we got our settings manager window and we click on Appearance then we move to fonts tab as shown in the following screenshot:

Here we need to choose Noto Sans Regular as ‘Default Font’ the size will be 10.

Then we click on “Select” and close the settings manager. We have done the font.

Configuring Themes

Our next part is configuring the themes for macOS. Here we use WhiteSur GTK themes. We can download it from this website. After navigating on the website we need to check the files section and download the WhiteSur dark theme and the WhiteSur Light theme. Those are highlighted on the following screenshot:

Then we again open our Thunar File Manager with root permission. Whenever we need to configure our system files we need root permissions. So again we use the command:

sudo thunar

Then we navigate to our Downloads folder and we got the themes tar.xz compressed files. Again we decompress (Extract Here) them. Then we need to copy those theme folders to /usr/share/themes directory. As we did in the following screenshot:

Now we can change the themes from Appearance in the Settings Manager.

Now we can change the style from default Kali-Dark to WhiteSur themes. Here we are choosing the dark one.

And we can change the feels, but need to do some more things.

On our ‘Settings Manager’ we need to navigate to the ‘Window Manager’.

Here we are in ‘Window Manager’, and change it’s theme to WhiteSur dark and also we need to change the Active button manager. As we know macOS have those minimise, maximise and close buttons on the left side. Changing the buttons are so simple just drag and drop. As we are doing it on the following screenshot:

Drag and Drop the buttons

Now we are done with the theming part. we are close to looks like a mac.

Installing Icons

Now its time to install icons in our Kali Linux systems. Icon theme will change the icons in our system just like macOS. Let we download the icon theme form this website.

After download this we use the same method to extract it. After extracting we got two folder inside it. One icon theme for light another for dark.

Again opens root accessed thunar file manager and paste the icon theme folders in /etc/share/icons directory, as we did in the following screenshot:

Then we can change the icons from the Appearance menu’s icon tab.

Not only icons macOS have special kind of cursors. To do change that we also need to download cursors and configure them.

We can download the McMojave cursors from here. We download and extract it. Then we need to copy them in icons directory that is /usr/share/icons

Then we can set our mouse cursor we again opens our settings manager and goes to “Mouse and Touchpad” option then we navigate to themes tab there and choose “McMojave cursor”, as shown in the following screenshots.

Mouse and Touchpad settings

Choosing cursor themes

After this our cursor and it’s effects will looks like macOS.

Configuring Top Panel

It’s time to configure our top panel. To do this we need to open our Panel>Panel Preference by right clicking on top panel, as shown in the screenshot:

After this we got the Panel Preference window here we need to auto hide the panel intelligently as we did in the following screenshot:

Then we need to go to the ‘Items’ tab in the ‘Panel Preference’ window. Here we have to change the Whisker Menu’s logo to Apple’s logo. We click on the edit item as seen in the following screenshot:

We need to click on the Edit button mouse pointer shows it

Now we got the settings window as shown in following screenshot:

Here to change the button we need to go to the ‘Panel Button’ tab.

Here we can change the button icon. To do it we click on the icon and after couple of seconds all the application icons comes in front of us. But to set Apple’s icon we need to navigate to ‘All icons’ from ‘Application Icon’.

Here in search bar we search for Start and we got a Apple logo we click on it and click on ‘OK’ to set it.

Now we can do other customization on other items whatever we need. For an example we can remove the workspace switcher if we don’t need it. As we like it.

Plank

Plank is a Linux dock this will give us the ultimate look of macOS. Here we need to install it and auto start it. To install it we need to run following command:

sudo apt-get install plank -y

After installation is complete we ca run it by applying following command:

plank

It will create a beautiful dock in our system as we can see in the following screenshot.

We got a dock but it’s not looks like macOS. Let’s configure it we need to add theme on plank. We already have downloaded the themes inside the WhiteSur Light and WhiteSur Dark themes folder.

We open our file manager thunar with root permission by using sudo command. Then we need to navigate to our Downloads directory and we can find a folder called plank inside the WhiteSur folders. Here we need to copy them in planks theme folder.

Before do it we need to rename those folders because light and dark themes for plank both are named as ‘plank’ and we can’t copy them in a same directory. We change the name of plank folders to ‘WhiteSur-light-Plank’ and ‘WhiteSur-dark-Plank’.

Then copy and paste those folders to /usr/share/plank/themes directory. As we did in the following screenshot.

Now we can change the theme of plank. To do this we need to open plank settings by clicking right with the ctrl key over the plank (press and hold Ctrl key and click right over plank items) then we need to go into the Preference. Then we can change the themes.

Here we got a Plank Preference window here we need to set the theme WhiteSur drk/light and enable the Icon Zoom (with 150 value) as shown in the following screenshot.

We also can add Plank docklets from the docklets tab. We just double click on ‘Trash’ & ‘Desktop’ docklets to add them on our plank dock.

To add new items on Plank dock we can drag and drop applications form main application window. To remove a item from plank dock we need to drag and through on the right side of desktop.
 

Here we notice that sometimes we got a shadow of the plank dock on our screen. To remove it we goes to the Settings Manager>Window Manager Tweaks Then navigate to ‘Compositor’ tab and uncheck the “Show shadows under dock windows”.

Now we need to set plank for auto start, if we did this then we don’t need to run plank command to start it. It will automatically start when we boot our system.

To set it we need to open our ‘Settings Manager’ again. Then forward to ‘Session and Startup’ then navigate to ‘Application Autostart’ tab and click on the ‘➕Add’.

Now we give it a name ‘Plank’ and the staring command will be plank. We fill it up and click on ‘OK’. 

Now we added plank on auto start apps. We are almost done.

Wallpaper

We have done lot’s of theming and modification but the original thing is the wallpaper without a mac wallpaper it will not bring the feeling. So we search on Google to Download HD macOS wallpaper and download some default macOS wallpaper image.

After downloading it we right click on it and set it as wallpaper.

To move our desktop icons on right side, we open Desktop settings by right clicking on our Desktop.

After opening Desktop settings we move to icons tab and set the icons orientations to ‘Top Right Vertical’.

Search Box of Mac

Here we give our system a search menu which will appear when we press “Ctrl+ Space Bar” 

To do this we need to run the following command to install Synapse.

sudo apt-get install synapse

After installation complete we will add this on our top panel we right click on our panel then Panel>Panel Preference>Items>Add(+)>Launcher>Add.

Then we click on launcher edit.

Here we click on ‘+’ icon to add a application. Then we set Synapse here as we did in the following screenshot.

After adding this we need to change it’s logo/icon to change it we click on edit as shown in the following screenshot:

Then we click icon the icon and we got list of icons here we go to all icons search for ‘Search’.

Now we can move this search icon from Items tab where we want to place it.

Then we can click on it to open, and we click on the right top button to open preference, as we showed in the following screenshot:

On the Preference window we check ✅ the “Startup on login” and uncheck the “Show notification icon” then we choose the theme to “Virgillio”.

Then we close it and whenever we need to search anything on our system we can click the search icon on our top panel or “CTRL+{SPACE-BAR}” to launch it.

Now our Kali looks similar to macOS as we can see in the following screenshot.

In this detailed article we give our Kali Linux a proper macOS theme. Trying it was a fun but it’s really looks awesome. 

Nowadays Kali got ZSH as default so our terminal is also is ZSH just like the macOS.

Love our articles? Make sure to follow us on Twitter and GitHub, we post article updates there. To join our KaliLinuxIn family, join our Telegram Group. We are trying to build a community for Linux and Cybersecurity. For anything we always happy to help everyone on the comment section. As we know our comment section is always open to everyone. We read each and every comment and we always reply.