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I am new to Ubuntu and everything, so I dont know much of anything about the terminal.

I am trying to install and start Tor. I downloaded the 64bit version from here. Then I downloaded Vidalia from Ubuntu's software center.

I entered these lines of code:

cd ~/Downloads
tar -xvf tor-browser-linux64-4.0.1_en-US.tar.xz
cd tor-browser-linux64-4.0.1_en-US

I was told to then enter:

chmod +x start_tor_browser.sh

But this is where I run into trouble. When I enter the line above, the output says:

chmod: cannot access ‘start_tor_browser.sh’: No such file or directory

Everything up to this point was working fine.

If I try to start Tor via Vidalia, it says Vidalia was unable to start Tor. Check your settings to ensure the correct name and location of your Tor executable is specified. But I have checked and rechecked and the Tor files, and they are exactly where Vidalia has them listed in settings.

If I try to click start-tor-browser (found in the folder named tor-browser_en-US) an error from archive manager pops up saying could not open "start-tor-browser" error opening file: no such file or directory.

I have tried to reinstall Tor, but it did not help.

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  • Open a terminal and enter the commands cd ~/Downloads/tor-browser-linux64-4.0.1_en-US then ls -la. Then edit your question with the output of the command.
    – Pabi
    Nov 4, 2014 at 7:14

1 Answer 1

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Instead of chmod +x start_tor_browser.sh the correct commands to allow executing the start-tor-browser file as a program are:

cd ~/Downloads
tar -xvf tor-browser-linux64-4.0.1_en-US.tar.xz  # extract the contents of the archive
cd tor-browser_en-US  # change directories to the root directory of the extracted files
chmod +x start-tor-browser    

After that, the command to start Tor Browser is:

./start-tor-browser  

If Tor Browser is running correctly, you can stop reading or else keep going and find out how to launch Tor Browser from the Dash by clicking on the Tor Browser icon instead of opening Tor Browser from the terminal every time.

If the Tor Browser is running correctly, you can make an icon to launch the Tor Browser from the Dash by following the instructions in How can I edit/create new launcher items in Unity by hand?. Or you can skip those instructions, and follow the instructions below which are specific to the tor-browser-linux64-4.0.1_en-US.tar.xz archive that you downloaded, so hopefully they will be easier to understand. I don't know your username, so instead I used your-username and you will have to replace that with your own username.

Below is an example of a .desktop file used to start Tor Firefox Browser from the Dash by clicking the Tor Browser icon. The Tor Browser icon looks the same as the Firefox icon with a label underneath it that says Tor Browser. The command used to show the .desktop file is cat '/home/your-username/.local/share/applications/Tor-Browser.desktop' which gives the following results:

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

Make a new file in the /home/your-username/.local/share/applications/ directory called Tor-Browser.desktop and copy the above text into the Tor-Browser.desktop file. Give start-tor-browser execute permissions by right-clicking it, open Properties and change the permission to Allow executing file as program by clicking the checkbox.

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  • why /.start-tor-browser? Did you mean ./start-tor-browser? If so please correct, because something like this might lead the user to still not get it working, even if mostly correct. It seems he is just following instructions literally line by line, with little knowledge of usual syntax, and probably lacks the ability to correct mistakes like this. Nov 22, 2019 at 5:34

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