Installing Kali Linux on a GPD Pocket

Thanks to a guy over on https://whitedome.com.au/re4son/ (you can follow him @Re4sonKernel on Twitter), it’s now fairly simple to put Kali on a GPD Pocket. I picked up a GPD Pocket a few months ago and after playing with it for a couple days, it found its way in a corner of my office where it’s been gathering dust ever since. I’ve recently gotten in to playing with Kali Linux and I’m having a blast with it. Finally, with the help of @Re4sonKernel I’m now able to get some use out of the GPD Pocket.

He has basically everything working at the time of this writing (2018/1/3) except encryption of the main partition, and the project is still under active development. The latest update was just a couple days ago on 2018/1/1.

You can track the active build log here: https://whitedome.com.au/re4son/pocket-kali/

Installing Kali on the GPD Pocket is fairly simple thanks to his nicely modified and packaged Kali image.

Installing Kali on the GPD Pocket

• Download the latest ISO here: https://whitedome.com.au/re4son/download/pocket-kali/
• Write the image to a USB drive (use Win32DiskImager on Windows, ‘dd’ on Linux, or if you have a Mac you can use this guide: http://stuffjasondoes.com/2018/07/18/making-a-bootable-linux-usb-drive-from-an-iso-on-macos-osx/).
• Turn off your GPD Pocket and insert the USB drive you burned the image to. Power on and hold Fn+7 (F7) until the boot menu pops up. (It will be sideways, this is normal)
• Select the option to boot from the USB stick.
• In the Kali menu (again, sideways), use arrow keys to select “Kali Live” and boot to the Kali desktop.
• In Kali, run GParted (Applications menu > Usual Applications > System Tools > GParted) and unmount the primary partition. Mine was mounted at “/media/root/Local Disk”
• Run debian-installer-launcher from a shell to install Kali.
• The installer is very generic and the typical choices will be obvious to your region, time zone, etc. When asked, choose to install to “Guided – use entire disk.” The hard disk will show up as something like “MMC/SSD.”
• Reboot, remove the USB drive, and enjoy.

By default the system comes with a small subset Kali’s typical tools installed, in order to keep the base installation size at a minimum. You can run the command “apt-get install kali-linux-full” to install all of the available tools, which totals a little over 3GB.

Conclusion

If you enjoyed this tutorial and would like to see more, please feel free to share this article on social media, comment below letting me know what else you’d like to see, and follow me on Twitter @JROlmstead.