Building Kali Linux for Banana Pro

Equipment

• MacOS with GNU/Linux Virtual Machine or GNU/Linux equivalent
• LeMaker Banana Pro arm_pc
• SDCard with at least 16GB capacity (preferably “Class 10” or higher)

Build Instructions

The Banana Pro has a dual core 1GHz Cortex™-A7 processor with a Mali400MP2 GPU and 1GB DDR3 RAM. Kali Linux can run from an external microSD card.

Kali Linux is supporting Banana Pro but it must be built from source. You will obviously need a GNU/Linux based OS (preferably Kali Linux) – although I personally use VMWare Workstation with Ubuntu 20.04. I’d advice you to mkswap of at least 8GB space, and extend your drive to min. 120GB. The build instructions are summarised below, with Banana Pro build script described here:

$ cd ~/
$ git clone https://gitlab.com/kalilinux/build-scripts/kali-arm
$ cd ~/kali-arm/
$ sudo ./common.d/build_deps.sh 			# will take some time

# => i'm a fan of Mate DE
$ sudo ./banana-pro.sh --desktop mate

	 Compilation info 
	 Hardware model:  Banana Pro (32-bit) 
	 Architecture: armhf 
	 OS build: kali-rolling 2022.2 
	 Desktop manager: mate

	 ...

The generated image will be deployed in the ./images directory with the *.img.xz.

Post-Build Instructions

After successfully building a Kali Linux image for Banana Pro, via the process explained above, you can now proceed to deploy the final arm image by any route of your interest.

Therefore, if you want to use dd – via GNU/Linux or MacOS:

xzcat images/kali-linux-2022.2-banana-pro-xfce-armhf.img.xz | sudo dd of=/dev/sdb bs=4M status=progres

Or, if you are like me – favoring BalenaEtcher which automatically fixes BOOT disk partitions:

Pick an Image -> Select SD Card -> Etch!

Running

Your Banana Pro might need a first-setup hardware equipment (display, mouse & kb).

Preflight Configuration:

I usually deploy the following config once I’m logged in Kali:

# => ssh kali@x.x.x.x
$ touch .hushlogin 		# => remove welcome message
$ echo $PS1 			# => (in .bashrc): PS1="@\h [\s] \w "
		"@\h [\s] \w "

@ kali [-bash] ~ 		# => clean term prompt

Enabling root account:

kali@kali:~$ sudo passwd
[sudo] password for kali:

Enabling root for SSH:

kali@kali:~$ grep PermitRootLogin /etc/ssh/sshd_config
#PermitRootLogin prohibit-password
# the setting of "PermitRootLogin without-password".
kali@kali:~$
kali@kali:~$ man sshd_config | grep -C 1 prohibit-password
     PermitRootLogin
             Specifies whether root can log in using ssh(1).  The argument must be yes, prohibit-password, forced-commands-only, or no.  The default
             is prohibit-password.

             If this option is set to prohibit-password (or its deprecated alias, without-password), password and keyboard-interactive authentication
             are disabled for root.
kali@kali:~$
kali@kali:~$ sudo systemctl restart ssh

Upgrading & Updating the box

kali@kali:~$ sudo apt update
kali@kali:~$ sudo apt full-upgrade -y
kali@kali:~$ sudo apt install -y kali-linux-default

Other metapacakages: System Packages, DE’s, Tools Package, Menu Package

Additional info is available on Kali.org website, which includes Kali In The Browser (noVNC), Kali In The Browser (Guacamole).