notes on using Kali Linux – KDE version

For some reason, the folks at Offensive Security removed the KDE build of Kali from their download list (the Enlightenment, XFCE, and LXDE versions are still there, but KDE is absent). Since KDE is my preferred window manager, this made me sad, until I found out you can grab them in the weekly and daily builds.

Once I had Kali/KDE up and running, the first thing I noticed was there was no GUI way to manage network interfaces. Having a background in Linux sysadmin, that wasn’t a huge obstacle – ifconfig, iwconfig, wpasupplicant, all were there and working. However, anyone that’s ever had to configure a WPA2/PSK interface by hand can testify that this is one of the few places where having a simple GUI management interface is just plain nice to have. I did some digging, and discovered that the problem was the plasma-nm applet was not installed. A simple apt-get install plasma-nm took care of that problem – and handily pulled in all the required dependencies for the rest of the KDE network management tools as well.

Other than that, the rest of the stuff I like about KDE was there, along with all the usual Kali tools and resources. Finally, I get the best of both worlds!