Kali bootable USB: hints and kinks

[orrin]

Recently installed Kali to my RPi3, and also to a USB drive for use on my Ubuntu16/Win10 laptop. Today I tried to make the Kali USB drive 'persistent,' and I thought maybe some people even more newbie than me might be interested in hearing what i had to do to make it work. Following the instructions blindly doesn't always work:

(1) Creating the USB drive, no problem: https://docs.kali.org/downloading/kali-linux-live-usb-install

However i had to do it using Win32 Disk Imager, because when i used the 'dd' method (from Ubuntu16 in a VirtualBox) it ran all night and still hadn't finished. So, Win32 imager.

(2) Then on to make the Kali installation have 'persistence' so it would save settings and be able to save downloaded applications and scripts: https://docs.kali.org/downloading/kali-linux-live-usb-persistence

... which is where i began to have some problems. Under Step 1. i wasn't getting the prescribed sdb1 and sdb2. I had 3 sdb drives already. So i went back and repeated the Win32 Disk Imager process, and then doing fdisk -l on the usb drive, in a Ubuntu16 machine, showed me sdb1 and sdb2. ... Step 2. went well, in my case it was kali-linux-2018.1-i386.iso and i executed each line in Step 2 separately, waiting for each process to finish. ... Step 3. again execute each line separately and wait for each one to finish before going on to the next. ...  Step 4. is where i was baffled; i wasn't getting persistence on re-boot. It turns out the directory wasn't being created, nor was the persistence.conf file. I had to go to /mnt, create the directory, cd to it, create persistence.conf and enter the ' / union ' and save it. Then unmount. I think that is all i had to do. Create a dummy text file in my home directory, save it, re-boot into Kali Persistent mode, and voila i had persistence. ... To experienced users, this all must seem silly, but six months ago i would have been totally baffled by the instructions "not working." Even newer newbies may find this hair-pulling today useful. ... THEN:

(3) Why wouldn't my command-line rtl-sdr WBFM script work?  rtl_fm -f 93.3e6 -M wbfm -s 200000 -r 48k - | aplay -r 48000 -f S16_LE

First, of course, sudo apt-get rtl-sdr. But my one-liner wouldn't put out because my Kali didn't have aplay. So: sudo apt-get install alsa-utils, then the script would run. Almost. This version of aplay didn't like '  -r 48k  ' so i had to change that to ' -r 48000 '.  Then i got my FM station. Audio quality poor, so i will have to tweak that script on Kali. On Ubuntu16 i think it sounded just fine.

So that was my day today. NEXT: installing rfcat on my Pentoo USB stick. I haven't a clue, yet. I did figure out that  'sudo apt-get install' gets replaced by 'sudo emerge --ask' but it doesn't find rfcat anywhere out there. I'm probably doing something wrong? ... Cheers.