The Pinebook has an Allwinner A64 Quad Core SOC with Mali 400 MP2 GPU, and 2GB LPDDR3 RAM. Kali Linux can run from either microSD card, or the internal eMMC.

By default, the Kali Linux Pinebook 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.

If you’re unfamiliar with the details of downloading and validating a Kali Linux image, or for using that image to create a bootable device, it’s strongly recommended that you refer to the more detailed procedures described in the specific articles on those subjects.

To install a pre-built image of the standard build of Kali Linux on your Pinebook, follow these instructions:

1. Get a fast microSD card or eMMC module with at least 16GB capacity. Class 10 cards are highly recommended.
2. Download and validate the Kali Pinebook image from the downloads area. The process for validating an image is described in more detail on Downloading Kali Linux.
3. 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 kali-linux-2024.1-pinebook-arm64.img.xz | sudo dd of=/dev/sdX bs=4M status=progress

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

Once the dd operation is complete, boot up the Pinebook with the microSD card plugged in.

You should be able to log in to Kali.

If you want to install Kali on your Pinebook’s eMMC module, there are 2 different ways to do so.

If you have the USB adapter for eMMC module then you can simply follow the same steps as you would for the microSD card.

If you do not have the USB adapter for eMMC module, you can use a bootable microSD card to write the Kali image to eMMC. The instructions are similar to the microSD card, and as with above, we need to make sure that we have the correct device. The easiest way to tell which device you want to use, is look in /dev at the mmcblkX devices. The device that has a boot0 and boot1 is the eMMC. For example, if /dev/mmcblk1boot0 exists it would mean that we want to use /dev/mmcblk1 as our device. One important difference is that we do need to include the number of the device, unlike above when using sdX.

$ xzcat kali-linux-2024.1-pinebook-arm64.img.xz | sudo dd of=/dev/mmcblk1 bs=4M status=progress

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

Once the dd operation is complete, boot up the Pinebook with the eMMC plugged in.

You should be able to log in to Kali.

If you want to customize the Kali Pinebook image, including changes to the packages being installed, changing the desktop environment, increasing or decreasing the image file size or generally being adventurous, check out the Kali-ARM Build-Scripts repository on GitLab, and follow the README.md file’s instructions. The script to use is pinebook.sh.