Although users are able to build and customize their Kali Linux ISOs however they wish, we often hear people comment about how they would love to see Kali with $desktop_environment instead of GNOME. We then engage with those people passionately, about how they can use live-build to customize not only their desktop environment but pretty much every aspect of their ISO, together with the ability to run scripted hooks at every stage of the ISO creation process – but more often than not, our argument is quickly lost in random conversation. As such, we’ve decided to expand our “full” 64bit releases with additional Desktop Environment flavored ISOs, specifically KDE, Mate, LXDE and Enlightenment. These can now be downloaded via our Kali Download page. For those curious to see what the various Desktop Environments look like, we’ve taken some screenshots for you:

Constantly keeping Kali on the bleeding edge means frequent updates to packages on an ongoing basis. Since our last release several months ago, there’s a few hundred new or updated packages which have been pushed to the Kali repos. This means that anyone downloading an ISO even 3 months old has somewhat of a long “apt-get dist-upgrade” ahead of them. To help avoid this situation, from this release onwards, we’ll be publishing updated weekly builds of Kali that will be available to download via our mirrors. Speaking of mirrors, we are always in need of support in this area – if you’re capable of running a high-bandwidth mirror and would like to support our project, please check out our Kali Mirrors page.

During these past few months, we’ve been busy adding new relevant tools to Kali as well as fixing various bugs and implementing OS enhancements. For example, something as simple as adding HTTPS support in busybox now allows us to preseed Kali installations securely over SSL. This is a quick and cool feature to speed up your installations and make them (almost) unattended, even if you don’t have a custom built ISO.

preseed/url=https://www.kali.org/dojo/preseed.cfg

Download Kali Linux 2016.2