Fixing a black screen after doing a Kali Linux update

Kali Linux is a rolling Linux distribution designed for security and penetration work. You can find details on it here: www.kali.org .

We run this excellent product for a range of different security work and it's been great. I built the image in VMplayer, then shared it to the team and we've all been at it since.

A recent update broke it though - black screen, no network and completely unresponsive.

There are lots of posts about similar things - mostly to do with graphics adaptors, however, we found that executing the following at a root prompt fixed it. But how to get to the root prompt from a blank screen?

Linux has a number of terminals available to the user - most of us use the graphical one to do our day to day, but you can access a command line prompt without much trouble. Simply hold CTRL-ALT and then F2 or F3 down at the same time and it drops you to a command line login.

BOOM. Time to fix it up. For me, and for the other fellas in the team, all it too was to issue this command:

apt --fix-broken install

And then reboot. Back to a graphics interface and networking is online again.

Enjoy