First step toward learning cyber! Installing a new OS. (virtual box or dual boot)
In this article I am going to explain how to install a new operating system in your computer.
First we need to understand, what is an operating system? An operating system can be explained as, a house in which different program lives, some of them take more space and resource while others may take less. Some examples of well known operating systems are Windows, Linux (Kali Linux, Ubuntu, Fedora, Parrot OS, Mint Linux), MacOS. Lets start with installing one of them.
Step 1: Download the .iso file for the operating system from the official website of the operating system (Do not trust any other website other than the official website). Lets take Kali Linux for example in this article, since we are interested in learning penetration testing.
Kali Linux is an open-source, Debian-based Linux distribution geared towards various information security tasks, such as Penetration Testing, Security Research, Computer Forensics and Reverse Engineering.
You can download the Kali Linux .iso file from here. Be careful while choosing your iso file, according to your needs and requirement. If you are doing it in a virtual box, choose the file for virtual box, if you are doing dual boot, choose one of the installer images.
Lets talk about virtual box for a second, A virtual box is a software, where you can install different types of operating system. So, it does not affect your current operating system. Beginners often prefer this because they are scared. Professionals prefer this because, its like use and throw. But for me I prefer dual boot, because it does not slow down my OS. In virtual box you are using an operating system inside a program, so it is always slow as compared to dual boot where you are installing it directly onto your hardware. But, virtual box is quite safe as compared to dual boot, where you can just wipe the program if you mess something up.
So, after downloading the .iso file from the official website, we can begin the next step.
Step 2: To create a bootable USB drive if you want to dual boot, but If you are using virtual box you can just open the program and select “Add” button to add a the .iso file of the OS you are installing. For bootable USB, you need to install a tool called RUFUS (if you are using windows); BalenaEtcher (if you are using any other OS currently).
Now you need a empty USB drive for creating a bootable USB, from which we will install the OS in our PC.
Now we have everything we need for installation of our new OS.
If you are using virtual box, it’s a straight forward process, but with dual boot it gets a little bit complicated but, the final result is very fast as compared to virtual box. We will continue with creating a bootable USB drive in my next article.
PS:- Always have a backup of your current OS and files, before you begin.
