The single most common causes of a broken Kali Linux installation are following unofficial advice, and particularly arbitrarily populating the system’s sources.list file with unofficial repositories.
The following post aims to clarify what repositories should exist in sources.list, and when they should be used.
The sources.list file can be found in the following directory:
/etc/apt/sources.list
Using an editor like Vim or nano will be quite useful.
Add the following entries to your sources file:
The Kali Rolling Repository
kali-rolling is our current active repository since the release of Kali 2016.1. Kali Rolling users are expected to have the following entries in their sources.list:
deb http://http.kali.org/kali kali-rolling main contrib non-free
# For source package access, uncomment the following line
# deb-src http://http.kali.org/kali kali-rolling main contrib non-free
# For source package access, uncomment the following line
# deb-src http://http.kali.org/kali kali-rolling main contrib non-free
Retired Kali sana (2.0) Repositories
For access to the retired sana repositories, have the following entries in your sources.list:
deb http://old.kali.org/kali sana main non-free contrib
# For source package access, uncomment the following line
# deb-src http://old.kali.org/kali sana main non-free contrib
# For source package access, uncomment the following line
# deb-src http://old.kali.org/kali sana main non-free contrib
