The NanoPi NEO Plus2 has an Allwinner H5, Quad Core Cortex™-A53 (ARMv8 64-bit) processor with Triple Core Mali-450 MP4 GPU and 1GB DDR3 RAM. The NanoPi NEO Plus2 has an 8GB eMMC, which is too small for a default Kali installation, so we run from an external microSD card.

By default, the Kali Linux NanoPi NEO Plus2 image contains the kali-linux-default metapackage similar to most other platforms. If you wish to install extra tools please refer to our metapackages page.

Kali does not provide pre-built images for download, but you can still generate one by cloning the Kali-ARM Build-Scripts repository on GitLab, and follow the README.md file’s instructions. The script to use is nanopi-neo-plus2.sh.

Once the build script finishes running, you will have an “img.xz” file in the images directory where you ran the script from. At that point, the instructions are the same as if you had downloaded a pre-built image.

The easiest way to generate these images is from within a pre-existing Kali Linux environment.

To install Kali on your NanoPi NEO Plus2, follow these instructions:

1. Get a fast microSD card with at least 16GB capacity. Class 10 cards are highly recommended.
2. Use the dd utility to image this file to your microSD card (same process as making a Kali USB.

In our example, we assume the storage device is located at /dev/sdX. Do not simply copy these value, change this to the correct drive path.

$ xzcat images/kali-linux-2024.1-nanopi-neo-plus2-arm64.img.xz | sudo dd of=/dev/sdX bs=4M status=progres

This process can take a while, depending on your PC, your microSD card speed, and the size of the Kali Linux image.

Once the dd operation is complete, boot up the NanoPi NEO Plus2 with the microSD card plugged in.

You should be able to log in to Kali.

The NanoPi NEO Plus2 will attempt to boot from the microSD card first if one is plugged in.

The wireless chipset is an Ampak AP6210, which is a rebranded Cypress (formerly Broadcom) Wireless card, so enterprising users may be able to get nexmon working, if the work was put in.

If you want to change boot arguments/the kernel command line, you will need to edit the /boot/boot.cmd file, and then run mkimage -C none -A arm -T script -d /boot/boot.cmd /boot/boot.scr.