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Dual boot with Ubuntu 20.04 and Kali Linux

  • Writer: Felipe Carvalho
    Felipe Carvalho
  • Jul 20, 2020
  • 3 min read



About the Technicalities

  1. Download your Ubuntu image

  2. Make your image bootable via USB or Disc (Who has a disk reader nowadays?) — Step by step how to make a USB stick bootable from Mac

  3. Make sure you computer is configured to be bootable from USB or Disk (Some deep BIOS work here to be done — There's also a Step by Step for this)

  4. Shutdown your system, stab your computer with that USB drive or insert your Disk and turn your device on

  5. If you're not getting greeted by that smooth Ubuntu 20.04 setup screen then something went really wrong and consider going back to 4. If that's still not doing it you probably messed something up with the bootable image or setting up your BIOS to boot from your media of choice.

  6. Follow the instructions until you get to the disk partitioning step.

  7. Select Something else option

  8. Create your partitions. This is how it looked for me:

  • I have a 500 GB hard drive and I wanted to give Ubuntu 200 GB

  • Create your EFI partition (500 MB), create your Swap partition (8 GB), create the Root partition (20 GB), create your Home partition (200 GB) and make sure the rest is marked as FREE SPACE

How to decide how much Swap you need? Check it out.

9. Now select what ever magical button is available to install and move forward with the setup process until the end. This might take a hot minute but it is what it is.


10. At this point you should have finished your Ubuntu 20.04 installation and should be ready to for the Kali Linux installation.


11. Download you Kali Linux Image (I choose the Installer image, but I believe you can use the Live also. Choose wisely)


12. Go back to step 2 and make now to make you Kali Linux Image bootable in you media of choice.


13. Turn off you computer, stab it with you USB drive or insert your disk in the disk reader and turn it on.


14. Follow the setup prompts and when you reach the Partition Disks part, you want to choose Guided — use the largest continuous free space option and make sure you select that FREE SPACE part that we left untouched in step 8


15. Continue and follow the magic steps until the setup wizard lets you know you should

remove the media. So go for it, remove that USB drive or disk.


16. Continue with prompts.


You might encounter a few situation here, I'm going to list two!


  • Your grub got configured like it should and when restart happens you'll be greeted by all your booting options, having you option for Ubuntu 20.04 and another option for Kali Linux and maybe a few more.

  • You don't even see grub or you see grub and there's no Kali Linux for you.


If you do find you self with this situation Fear no More, just login with to your Ubuntu and run this command:


sudo update-grub

You should notice some action on the command output and it should say something about Kali and possibly sda5 (or something similar).


Now, restart you computer and grub will greet you with all that you need. If not, let me know and let's talk about it.


About the Experience

Sweet baby Jesus… What a week.

I've been working as a software engineer for the best part of the last 10 years and I got complacent with all things related to the normal Network Admin routines and partitioning disks and all this good stuff just slept out of my brain.


Not only did it slip out, I was in mostly agonizing pain about how to do the partitioning, how much space and also a bunch of other things.


I installed Ubuntu, then installed Kali at least 8 times. I got really comfortable making my only USB drive bootable with their images, even though I still couldn't commit the commands to heart.


The point was? I wanted a good way to partition the disk but without much hassle. Ubuntu and Kali only give you one easy choice each and that's write on the entire disk or do it you way. Really? Can we just assign an amount of space we want for any of them to take care and just go with that? No, right?


Eventually I put on my big boy pants on and researched how to do this. Even on my full time tech support work in college I wasn't proficient with Linux, I was really good with Microsoft and was fascinated by Unix based systems, but Kali always scared me.


But I conquered my inner diva, browsed around for some articles and YouTube videos and I was able to partition the disk during Ubuntu installation, then right away install Kali, update grub and now I'm living in Dual Boot Heaven! Oh yeah and I purchase 3 new USB drives that were on sale at Target.


So hey! This was cool, right?

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