First (X) things to do after installing Kali Linux

Update: 2 Jun 2018 - I'm not longer really updating this. Rather, I'm updating the New Kali Setup script I have on github. There's still a few things I mess with manualy, but I'm not going to try to come back to this every X releases.

A long time ago I discovered a guide on the first 20 things to do after installing Kali. It's not a bad start, but I don't find most of those things super useful. I found myself coming back to it time and again though to copy the few things I did find useful, such as the archive manager, repository fixes, and GPU processing.

Finally, I'm starting my own list. The first (X) things to do, because this list will grow and change...

1) Update, install VMware tools, and reboot.

apt-get update
apt-get install open-vm-tools-desktop fuse

2) New Setup Script

Rather than make 30 steps to do everything, I tried to roll it all into a script on GitHub that will be easier to update and modify.

git clone https://github.com/BeanBagKing/new_kali_setup
cd new_kali_setup
./new_setup.sh

3) Uncomment ls aliasese

vim .bashrc

:set number #displays line numbers
#around line 87 you should see "some more ls aliases"
#un-comment all of these

:wq

4) Install Scrub/Securely Empty Trash I'll leave this here, because it's still a cool script, but not something I typically use.

Thanks to user "testingresults" for this script. Requires scrub

• Create a script, wherever you like, I use ~/trash.sh
• Save this to it and make it executable (chmod +x trash.sh)
• Run it to securely empty your trash!

#!/bin/bash

find ~/.local/share/Trash/files ~/.local/share/Trash/info -type f -print0 | xargs -0 -I{} /usr/bin/scrub -Sfp random {}

find ~/.local/share/Trash/files/* ~/.local/share/Trash/info/* -depth | while read i
do
    cleant=$(head -c17 /dev/urandom | tr -d [[:space:]] | tr -d [[:punct:]])
    mv "$i" ~/.local/share/Trash/files/"$cleant" 2> /dev/null
done

rm -rf ~/.local/share/Trash/files/*

5) Install avconv if you use screen capturing

.webm is a great file format, if you don't plan on doing anything with it. However, there aren't a ton of programs that import and export it, and even less so on Linux. We can easily convert them to H246 MP4 format (or any other) from the command line with avconv (previously ffmpeg) though.

avconv -i InFile.webm -c:v libx264 -crf 18 -c:a aac -strict experimental OutFile.mp4

There's some explanation of the flags in that command on Super User. I find -crf 18 gives you pretty good output.

6) Turn off the screen lock

This is somewhat optional, but I generally use Kali in a VM, and the screen lock gets really annoying when I already have one on my Windows machine.

Under settings, select power and change "Blank screen" to never. Go back to the main settings menu, and under privacy, change "Screen lock" to off.

7) Install NVIDIA Drives (2 Jun 2018 - This part is ooooooold, and I haven't used Kali outside of a VM in ages, so no idea if it still works)

This is always a mess... however, it seemed to be easy this time around.
Manually find/extract your correct driver on the GeForce page
http://www.geforce.com/drivers
The rest of this can probably be placed in a better order, but here's what worked for me.

Download drivers
CTRL ALT F1 and login
init 3
service gdm stop

Let it try to disable noviou drivers
install will fail, reboot
CTRL ALT F1
init 3
service gdm stop
try install agian

need kernel source files
aptitude -r install linux-headers-$(uname -r)

try install agian

unable to do the 32bit compatibility (oh well)

do the auto x configuration thing

reboot...
WORKING!

8) Setup Ctrl+Alt+Del equivalent

Go to Settings -> Keyboard -> Shortcuts
Press the + in the lower left to create a new shortcut
Name it what you want, set the shortcut to...
gnome-system-monitor
Click add and set the shortcut to your preferred keys.