kali linux 2.0 new features

Our Next Generation Penetration Testing Platform

We’re still buzzing and recovering from the Black Hat and DEF CON conferences where we finished presenting our new Kali Linux Dojo, which was a blast. With the help of a few good people, the Dojo rooms were set up ready for the masses – where many generated their very own Kali 2.0 ISOs for the first time. But the excitement doesn’t end for us just yet. With the end of the cons, we now find ourselves smack in the middle of the most significant release of Kali since 2013. Today is the day that Kali 2.0 is officially released.

So, what’s new in Kali 2.0? There’s a new 4.0 kernel, now based on Debian Jessie, improved hardware and wireless driver coverage, support for a variety of Desktop Environments (gnome, kde, xfce, mate, e17, lxde, i3wm), updated desktop environment and tools – and the list goes on. But these bullet point items are essentially a side effect of the real changes that have taken place in our development backend. Ready to hear the real news?  Take a deep breath, it’s a long list.

New Flavours of Kali Linux 2.0

Through our Live Build process, Kali 2.0 now natively supports KDE, GNOME3, Xfce, MATE, e17, lxde and i3wm. We’ve moved on to GNOME 3 in this release, marking the end of a long abstinence period. We’ve finally embraced GNOME 3 and with a few custom changes, it’s grown to be our favourite desktop environment. We’ve added custom support for multi-level menus, true terminal transparency, as well as a handful of useful gnome-shell extensions. This however has come at a price – the minimum RAM requirements for a full GNOME 3 session has increased to 768 MB. This is a non-issue on modern hardware but can be detrimental on lower-end machines. For this reason, we have also released an official, minimal Kali 2.0 ISO. This “light” flavour of Kali includes a handful of useful tools together with the lightweight Xfce desktop environment – a perfect solution for resource-constrained computers.