Virtual Box

This is great. I anm very excited about it.

Virtual Box (VB) runs a virtual Operating System on your PC. So, on my Windows PC I can run iOS or Linux. So that is great.

I have wanted to play in Linux but have not wanted to setup a server on some cloud as I have no specific use case for it. I have dabbled with the Raspberry Pi wich uses Linux but have not gone too far with that.

Background

I got an email from FreeCodeCamp on License To Pentest: Ethical Hacking Course For Beginners and I’ve watched the first part of that and they used virtualbox and kali for ethical hacking. So I found a video and started to load Virtual box on it with Ubantu, then realised that I needed to do a different install for Kali and so uninstalled it and reinstalled VB with Kali. I also started to watch another video on Ethical Hacking Full Course – Learn Ethical Hacking in 10 Hours

That also referenced Kali as operating system (about 3 hours into this tutorial).

VB & Ubuntu

This isn’t the first video I used to install Ubuntu on VB but it highlights something which I had an issue with on first install, that is it kept on trying to re-install itself.

The first time I installed it it was seriously slow, and on closing it down and starting VB again it wanted to reinstall the iso file. So after install you need to move/delete the iso file so it can’t find it, then it’ll install properly. It loads up with some freeware libreoffice and firefox, which is handy, so you can start using it straight away.

I am having issues with screen proportion at the moment, but I can always tweek that later.

VB & Kali

So I found the kali download site and initially I downloaded a .ada file but it needed the iso file , about 3 gigly bites, so a couple of whiles later with slow download I had that ready to install, it is a Debian Linux system install that is different and more elaborate than the Ubantu install, lots more questions and there seemed to be more individual settings and partitioning and a GRUB install for booting the system.

All very complicated, and after install I rebooted windows and then couldnt log in as the keyboard didn’t work. The trackpad and on/off button worked but the normal keypad NO! (oh shit oh shit oh shit) but fortunately I could plug a keyboard into the USB and get access to logging in. There seemed to be a problem in device manager the HiD Mini Driver for Surface had a STATUS_DEVICE_POWER_FAILURE and uninstalling the driver and re-starting computer quite a few times did not fix it at all. So I tried to delete the VB and then restarted windows and all was well.

So after that scare I decided to install Ubantu on VB and allocate it more RAM & CPU (2 instead of 1)and hopefully it would have a better speed as the first install was pretty sluggish.

When I opened the VB again I saw the Kali install was still there, and I tested it and it works, so I shut it down and then re-booted Windows and that works fine too, the keyboard is working.

Reading a few posts on the Kali install apparently this is not for beginners, so I’m feeling fortunate that I got it up and running. I was worrried that I may have to do another windows install from scratch (Whew!).