Dual Function Laptop

[Loboexe]

I have acquired A Dell Latitude E6410 laptop that looks almost brand new for £50, about $35 in your money. It has a 4 core i7 processor and 8GB of RAM.

I have had Linux Mint on it and it runs great. I want to use it as my day to day working system. As such it will hold my personal details, client details, my itinerary, banking etc. I am now going to start doing a bit more travelling with my work and want to take the laptop with me.

Laptops are high on the list as an easy theft target so now I want to scrub the current OS and re-install the latest Mint with encryption. For some of my work I also want to install Kali Linux. Currently I have this on an older more battered laptop but do not want to carry two laptops around.

I have fitted a 1TB Hybrid drive to the Dell laptop and want to set up an Dual Boot system with Mint for day to day use and Kali available when required for work, but I want to make sure that the laptop is encrypted just in case it does get stolen or lost in transit.

Can anybody advise on how to achieve this?

Would it be better to make it a dual boot where you choose either Mint or Kali and only have one or the other OS running ? If so can they share any partitions like /swap or /home ?

Or should I run Kali inside of Mint as a VM? and if so are there problems when using additional WiFi interfaces and Blue Tooth devices with the Kali VM. I have got a separate WiFi Alpha Network adapter for WiFi sniffing and am looking to buy a pineapple, I also have a SDR dongle and want to add to these tools so any advice on getting them to work with a VM Kali would be helpful if I go down this root

[TYTechnolust]

Maybe put Kali on a bootable flash drive. Simply boot from the flash when you need it.

[i8igmac]

Maybe put Kali on a bootable flash drive. Simply boot from the flash when you need it.

I agree with this...

How much hard drive space do you have... dual boot is nice some times...

[Sinn3rman]

Maybe put Kali on a bootable flash drive. Simply boot from the flash when you need it.

I agree with this method also, especially when travelling to high risk destinations

[barry99705]

Or, just run Kali as your daily driver. Both my laptops, personal, and work run Kali only. My work one has windows as a vm for those windows only software occasions. Install Kali, set up a new user, log in as that user. You now run it just like a normal Debian laptop.

[Loboexe]

I have a 1TB drive fitted so plenty of space for dual boot.

[i8igmac]

go for the dual boot.

dual voot installation is automated...

My suggestions, install kali first with the gui... then install linux mint with the gui and select 'side by side installation"

So the mint will boot first by default.

[cooper]

My suggestion: 3 partitions, all encrypted.

- Mint

- Kali

- Shared data

You could do more partitions, but I personally found it excruciatingly annoying that I needed to fiddle with USB sticks (which break or are slow or lack the capacity or were still formatted for FAT so your biggest file is 2GB or all of the above) and such to move data between the various OSes on *the same machine*. It might very well not make sense to do so (or even a lot of sense to NOT do so) in your particular usage scenario, but it's at least something to consider.

Alternatively, if it's not used very often, you could just try running Kali in a VM while on Mint.