Howto Setup Vidalia TOR GUI with Ubuntu



Tor is the open source leader to anonymous connections on the internet, you can anonymize your internet presence from AIM/ICQ/MSN/ Jabber/IRC/WWW/FTP and you can even issue a torify command at the command prompt to anonymize your wget/ssh/lynx/ftp/perl or whatever. Basically tor is for the people by the people, it is only alive because we make it so, we can choose to use it freely or use it freely and help it out by running a server on your computer to make the internet safer. Basically tor encrypts your data communications through chained/linked proxies all over the internet.

Vidalia is a cross-platform controller GUI for Tor, built using the Qt framework. Using Vidalia, you can start and stop Tor, view the status of Tor at a glance, and monitor Tor’s bandwidth usage. Vidalia also makes it easy to contribute to the Tor network by helping you set up and manage your own Tor server.

Vidalia runs on most platforms supported by Qt 4.1 or later, including Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux or other Unix variants using the X11 window system.

Prepare your system

sudo apt-get install libevent

Now you need to get the latest tor source code from here

wget http://www.torproject.org/dist/tor-0.2.0.22-rc.tar.gz

tar zxvf tor-0.2.0.22-rc.tar.gz

cd tor-0.2.0.22-rc

./configure

make

sudo make install

Install Vidalia GUI

You need to edit the /etc/apt/sources.list file

sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list

add the following lines

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/adnarim/ubuntu gutsy main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/adnarim/ubuntu gutsy main

Save and exit the file

Update the source list

sudo apt-get update

Install vidalia

sudo apt-get install vidalia

Once installed press alt F2 and open the run prompt and type in “vidalia” without the quotes, this will start tor, vidalia and you can configure tor/vidalia by right clicking on the tray applet and click on settings, right there you can view all the nodes and choose what to connect to, see node uptimes, os’s and locations with a graphical map.

For web browsing in firefox I prefer using an extention named FoxyProxy it works well with firefox and swiftfox, you can grab this extention directly from here

If you prefer stronger anonymity & protection I strongly Suggest Torbutton for firefox you can download from here

Install the addon and go through the Tor wizard and it will set you up for you and you can view which tor nodes you connect through actively via vidalia

Speed Tweaks for tor

Lets get to editing our torrc so we can improve the speed!

gedit ~/.vidalia/torrc

Paste this at the beginning of the torrc:

# Set the Tor Circuit Build time to find faster tor servers, increments of seconds

CircuitBuildTimeout 2

# connections while Tor is not in use.

KeepalivePeriod 60

# Force Tor to consider whether to build a new circuit every NUM seconds.

NewCircuitPeriod 15

# Set How many entry guards we should we keep at a time

NumEntryGuards 8



Source from here




0 comments: