0009658: Offline installer 2026.1rc3 fails at multiple stages — debootstrap, busybox, and cdrom package fetch - Kali Linux Bug Tracker

ID	Project	Category	View Status	Date Submitted	Last Update

0009658	Kali Linux	Kali Package Bug	public	2026-04-27 16:29	2026-05-07 09:08

Reporter	Nitehawk209	Assigned To	arnaudr
Priority	normal	Severity	minor	Reproducibility	have not tried
Status	closed	Resolution	unable to reproduce

Summary	0009658: Offline installer 2026.1rc3 fails at multiple stages — debootstrap, busybox, and cdrom package fetch
Description	Environment: Kali version: 2026.1rc3 (latest snapshot as of April 2026) Architecture: amd64 Installation method: Offline installer ISO Hardware: Custom desktop, 3TB HDD (sdc), WiFi via USB adapter (rt2870 firmware) Tested with: Two different USB drives (Kingston DataTraveler 62GB, WD 2TB external) Errors encountered in order: cdrom:// fetch failures during "Select and install software" — apt could see the package index but failed to read every .deb from the USB with "Failed to fetch cdrom://[Kali GNU/Linux 2026.1rc3 Kali-last-snapshot]" for all packages. Packages were confirmed present on USB via ls /cdrom/pool/main. Bind mounting /cdrom to /target/media/cdrom0 did not resolve it. "Unable to install busybox" — When retrying Install the base system after repartitioning, debootstrap failed immediately with "An error was returned while trying to install the busybox package onto the target system." "Asked to install suite kali-rolling, but got (codename: ) from mirror" — On subsequent attempts, debootstrap connected to the network mirror but received an empty codename response, causing immediate failure. Filesystem corruption cascade — The repeated failed installs caused ext4 filesystem errors on the target partition (sdc2), which triggered automatic remount as read-only (errors=remount-ro,emergency_ro), requiring e2fsck between attempts. debconf-apt-progress failures — All Python-based apt tools failed inside the installer environment with ImportError: /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/apt_pkg.cpython-313-x86_64-linux-gnu.so: file too short — both .so files were 0 bytes. Workaround: Downloading and installing from the 2024.2 offline installer ISO on identical hardware completed successfully with no errors. Steps to reproduce: Download latest Kali offline installer ISO Write to USB with dd if=kali.iso of=/dev/sdX bs=4M status=progress oflag=sync Boot and proceed through installer to "Install the base system" or "Select and install software" Observe failures as described above

arnaudr 2026-05-07 09:08 manager ~0021651	Closing as this report doesn't make much sense. "2026.1rc3" is a release candidate, this is no what we publish, where did you get this image from? We release every quarter, so picking a 2 years-old image (2024.2) as a workaround is super strange, this image is no longer avail for download. "Filesystem corruption cascade" indicates faulty hardware, either USB drive or target disk, this has nothing to do with the installer. Finally, if the installer were so badly broken, we'd receive several reports every day about it - so far we received none since 2026.1 was released.

Date Modified	Username	Field	Change
2026-04-27 16:29	Nitehawk209	New Issue
2026-05-07 09:08	arnaudr	Note Added: 0021651
2026-05-07 09:08	arnaudr	Assigned To	=> arnaudr
2026-05-07 09:08	arnaudr	Status	new => closed
2026-05-07 09:08	arnaudr	Resolution	open => unable to reproduce