Getting your system ready for a CTF might be one of the most important things to do, especially if the CTF is limited in time. You don't want to spend all your time installing tools. But what tools do you need to start out with? What programs you need just add to kali?

To really get the most out of the setup you need to use it regularly / break it / take snapshots and do CTF's.

So to starts out, download Kali and Virtualbox and setup a VM. The base install still might not have all the tools you need. Do you believe you still in to install tor on kali? I would think it would have been there I use it all the time...

Also most important if you are using a VM in a CTF. Use a USB wifi or ethernet adapter and disable the virtual nic.

Here are some things that I do after installing a new Kali setup.

First setup your own user account and add it to sudoers if you didnt do it in the setup.

It's always good to start off with an update and upgrade.

update and install all the megapacks

sudo apt-get update && apt-get upgrade -y 
reboot

Here we install everything plus some extras that I like. The megapack is about 18G of programs.

Other megapacks are listed here Kali Linux Metapackages | Kali Linux Documentation.

sudo apt install kali-linux-everything -y

sudo apt install alsa-utils \
unace rar unrar p7zip-rar \
file-roller htop nethogs tor tor-arm tor-geoipdb \
transmission transmission-cli transmission-gtk \
remmina gdebi vim-nox vim-scripts privoxy multitail \
steghide par2 terminator pppconfig pppoeconf \
terminator multitail python3-virtualenv \
libgpgme-dev swig libgeoip-dev -y 

network-manager fix

If you want to Turn on and off your network device.

sudo sed -i 's/managed=false/managed=true/' /etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf
sudo service network-manager restart

python env

Having a python environment is always good and Jupyter.

I attached my pip-freeze-list.zip to this post.

virtualenv pyenv 
source pyenv/bin/activate
pip install pip-freeze-list

Here is a handy way to start jupyter

cat <<EOF> run_jupython.sh
#!/bin/bash 
screen -dmS Servers -t Main 
screen -S Server -p 0 -X stuff "source ~/pyenv/bin/activate; cd ~/Documents; jupyter lab \n"
EOF 

chmod 755 run_jupython.sh

Atom text editor

Here we install Atom text editor.

sudo cat <<EOF> "deb [arch=amd64] https://packagecloud.io/AtomEditor/atom/any/ any main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/atom.list
EOF

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys 4C6E74D6C0A35108

sudo apt update 
sudo apt install atom