Kali Linux History

 

Kali Linux History

​Kali Linux is based on years of knowledge and experience of building a pentestion testing Operating Systems, which has spanned over multiple previous projects. During all these project's life-time, there has been only a few different developers, as the team has always been small. As a result, Kali has been years in the making and has come a long way.​

The first project was called Whoppix, which stood for WhiteHat Knoppix. As can be inferred from the name, it was based on Knoppix for the underlining OS. Whoppix had releases ranging from v2.0 to v2.7.​

This made way for the next project, WHAX (or the long hand, WhiteHat Slax). The name change was because the base OS changed from Knoppix to Slax. WHAX started at v3, as a nod towards it carrying on from Whoppix.​

There was a similar OS being produced at the same time, Auditor Security Collection (often getting shorted to just Auditor), once again using Knoppix, and efforts were combined (with WHAX) to produce BackTrack. BackTrack was based on Slackware from v1 to v3, but switched to Ubuntu later on with v4 to v5.​

Using the experience gained from all of this, Kali Linux came after BackTrack. Kali started off using Debian stable as the engine under the hood before moving to Debian testing when Kali became a rolling OS.​

​Below is a rough overview of how Kali Linux came to be:​

DateProject ReleasedBase OS
2004-AugustWhoppix v2Knoppix
2005-JulyWHAX v3Slax
2006-MayBackTrack v1Slackware Live CD 10.2.0
2007-MarchBackTrack v2Slackware Live CD 11.0.0
2008-JuneBackTrack v3Slackware Live CD 12.0.0
2010-JanuaryBackTrack v4 (Pwnsauce)Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex)
2011-MayBackTrack v5 (Revolution)Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx)
2013-MarchKali Linux v1 (Moto)Debian 7 (Wheezy)
2015-AugustKali Linux v2 (Sana)Debian 8 (Jessie)
2016-JanuaryKali Linux RollingDebian Testing

This is only the major releases, there were minor ones to address bug fixes, releases, and tools updates.

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