Kali Linux — Rolling Edition
<<Official>>
Today marks an important milestone for us with the first public release of our Kali Linux rolling distribution. Kali switched to a rolling release model back when we hitversion 2.0 (codename “sana”), however the rolling release was only available via an upgrade from 2.0 to kali-rolling for a select brave group. After 5 months of testing our rolling distribution (and its supporting infrastructure), we’re confident in its reliability – giving our users the best of all worlds – the stability of Debian, together with the latest versions of the many outstanding penetration testing tools created and shared by the information security community.
Kali Rolling Release vs Standard Releases
To get a better understanding of the changes that this brings to Kali, a clearer picture of how rolling releases work is needed. Rather than Kali basing itself off standard Debian releases (such as Debian 7, 8, 9) and going through the cyclic phases of “new, mainstream, outdated”, the Kali rolling release feeds continuously fromDebian testing,ensuring a constant flow of the latest package versions.
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Continuously Updated Penetration Testing Tools
Our automated notification system of updated penetration testing tool releases has been working well over the past 5 months and has ensured that the kali-rolling repository always holds the latest stable releases of monitored tools. This usually leaves a gap of around 24-48 hours from notification of a new tool update, to its packaging, testing, and pushing into our repositories. We would also like to introduce our new Kali Linux Package Tracker which allows you to follow the evolution of Kali Linux both with email updates and a comprehensive web interface. The tracker can also help in identifying which versions of various tools and packages are in our repository at any given moment. As an example, the screenshot below shows the timeline of the nmap package in Kali and tracks its repository versions.
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Transitioning From Kali 2.0 to Kali Rolling
Migrating from Kali sana (2.0) to Kali rolling is simple. As root, you can run the following commands and be on your way:
cat << EOF > /etc/apt/sources.list deb https://http.kali.org/kali kali-rolling main non-free contrib EOF apt-get update apt-get dist-upgrade # get a coffee, or 10. reboot
Please note that the Kali sana repositories will no longer be updated and will be EOL’d on the 15th of April 2016.
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Gloss