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You may have noticed that the Tor package in the repos doesn't work well with the Vidalia pakcage in the same repos. Funny, huh? So I did a little bit of research to find out how to easily run Tor on Ubuntu. For anyone unfamiliar with Tor, it's an application that anonymizes your traffic by encrypting it and sending over several computers, or "relay nodes". It works rather well for anonymous surfing, IM or basically anything else, but not torrents. Do not try to torrent with Tor, it will very likely fail. If all this is fine, and you're interested, read my own answer below :)

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Okay, so, for this installation process we'll be using the Tor browser bundle. It's a neat package that contains anything necessary to use Tor as you'd normally use it, but it also contains a modified version of Mozilla Firefox that's called the TorBrowser. You don't have to use all of the software included. This guide will cover both using the TorBrowser and simply configuring Tor for routing any other kind of (techspeak: TCP-only) traffic through Tor.

First things first, we gotta download the thing. Find out if your Ubuntu install is 32 or 64-bit. If you don't know how to do this, here's a simple way. Hit Ctrl-Alt-T. A terminal window will pop up. Type in uname -m and hit Enter. If this outputs x86_64 then you're on a 64-bit system. Otherwise, you're on a 32-bit one. Now go over here and download the browser bundle for your architecture. Once the download is finished, head over to whereever the download is stored, right click the downloaded archive and choose Extract here, as shown below. Unpacking screenshot

Once the unpacking has finished, you will get a directory called tor-browser_en-US if you downloaded the English version, or tor-browser_ru_RU if you downloaded the Russian one, and so on. Head over to this directory. Now, it's time to decide what to do. If you are an unexperienced user and simply want to browse anonymously, just double-click start-tor-browser. You may be asked what to do with this file, choose Run. A Vidalia window will pop up. Once it says Connected to the Tor network!, wait for a couple seconds and TorBrowser will also open. Vidalia and TorBrowser windows Browse as much as you'd like, after done just exit Vidalia and TorBrowser.

All that is fine for browsing, but Tor is also capable of encrypting other kind of traffic. Since showing the browser window every time isn't a necessity, and since the configuration used in Tor Browser Bundle is optimal for web browsing but not much else, and it's best to leave it alone since it's a good configuration for using the TorBrowser, the bundle also includes stand-alone versions of Tor and Vidalia. To use Tor standalone, without the browser, just head over to the App folder and double-click the vidalia file. This will open up a "clean" Tor session with the default configurations for everything, as if you installed from the package manager (although it tends to work better). However, there is a problem -- it doesn't autodetect the GeoIP database, which is necessary for certain Tor options to work properly. This is an easy fix, actually. Click Settings, go to the Advanced tab and click Edit current torrc. The file is empty by default, which is just fine, since default options are set automatically. You'll need to add a line saying GeoIPFile /path/to/tor-browser_en-US/Data/Tor/geoip where /path/to/ is whatever directory you downloaded the bundle to. Click OK twice and you're all set. If you're familiar with Tor, you may also set any kind of advanced options, but this should be fine for most things. However, you will need to route apps through Tor. The easiest way to do so is to simply modify your system's proxy settings. Go to System Settings and choose Network, then fill out the settings like shown below. Netwokr proxy settings. Note that 9050 is the default tor port, if you changed that, of course you should use a different one here too. Also, since this isn't the default port used by the TorBrowser when you use start-tor-browser, you can run both the TorBrowser and the standalone Vidalia at the same time, with entirely different settings, and they won't even interfere with each other!

Finally, here are a few helpful launchers. Place these in /home/yourname/.local/share/applications and make sure they have a .desktop extension. They will add the Tor Browser and Vidalia to your launcher menus. Of course, you must substitute paths appropriately.

For Tor Browser:

[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Type=Application
Name=Tor Browser
Comment=A secure version of Firefox, from the Tor project
Icon=firefox
Exec=/path/to/tor-browser_en-US/start-tor-browser
Path=/path/to/tor-browser_en-US
Terminal=false
StartupNotify=false
Categories=Network
Name[en_CA]=Tor Browser
Comment[en_CA]=A secure version of Firefox, from the Tor project

For stand-alone Vidalia:

[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Type=Application
Name=Vidalia
Comment=A control panel for Tor
Icon=/path/to/tor-browser_en-US/App/Firefox/icons/updater.png
Exec=/path/to/tor-browser_en-US/App/vidalia
Path=/path/to/tor-browser_en-US/App
Terminal=false
StartupNotify=false
Categories=Network
Name[en_CA]=Vidalia
Comment[en_CA]=A control panel for Tor

I hope this solution has helped you as much as it helped me. Happy safe surfing!

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    Seems this great post is outdated as I don't find a TOR BUNDLE. I find Tor Browser and Vidalia which when installed separately do not work together. Would be great if this could be updated for that problem.
    – user381440
    Feb 22, 2015 at 18:58

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