[LATE] Manifesting myself as a hacker by running Kali Linux (... on a VM)
**Actual ts: 2023-10-26T17:43:21** For not so many years, installing Kali Linux directly on my disk is one of the things I avoided. Actually Backtrack/Kali is one of my early Linux distro of choice because I just want to look like hackers lol. Now, Debian is my daily driver. I love the secure feeling of being stable. It also comes with much drawback. That is, you can't install the latest software right from the Debian repo. You have to either run it using snap/flatpak, build it yourself, or some other way. I like to use penetration testing tools to do some hacking or anything. For some time, I have been installing all the tools I needed manually in my Debian box (I store it in `~/opt`, I feel like globally installing things in Debian would make it a FrankenDebian). Then, I realized that I have been piling up way too many hacking tools that I am starting to feel tired to keep them all up-to-date or just to run them in a weird way sometimes. I love Kali but I would not use it directly as my daily driver or as another OS option when booting my laptop. I would love to run it with live USB or just as a VM. I tried making a VM of it and using it as an alternate graphical desktop but that (I've tested a week ago) feels very sluggish and not productive. Then I came across a thing called X11 Forwarding. It allows an SSH session to somehow forward any graphical output (from a remote program) to my currently running X11 server. That way, I thought, I would never need a SPICE/VNC server to access my Kali VM graphically (no problem with BurpSuite/any graphical tools). It's just `-X` flag away lol. I believe this will change me forever. I am planning to just run or install any hacking/pentesting tools right in the Kali VM. Because I am using X11 forwarding, it is surprising to also know that my local system clipboard is also accessible from within the SSH session (maybe also change `-X` to `-Y` idk for sure). I made this wrapper script to switch quickly from my terminal to a kali SSH session. ![screenshot lol](https://i.ibb.co/jv2xTcD/2023-10-27-004209-1603x552-scrot.png) Hopefully this VM setup will last. It seems enjoyable! TODO: Will reviewCreated: 2024-04-08 23:20:25, Updated: 2024-04-08 23:20:40, ID: c7ec257c-401e-4830-acf8-258548efcfd6