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.