vidalia on linux

1 November 2007 at 7:05 am (Fedora, Tor) ()

Fedora 7:

Previously I had Tor running as a service, without Vidalia. That setup worked fine, but I also wanted a Tor controller, in order to easily change exit nodes. Since my Fedora 7 has GNOME already and not KDE, there’s no obvious solution. I could find a way to use TorK, or find a way to use Vidalia. I’m already accustomed to Vidalia, so that’s my choice.

Vidalia isn’t in the Fedora repositories, though, and it isn’t in freshrpms, an alternative Fedora repository. I didn’t want to dig anywhere else. I downloaded the Vidalia rpm directly from the Vidalia project page, and used their instructions. It says Vidalia requires nas, qt4, and qt4-x11. Why it needs nas I cannot guess, but that was already installed on my system. I used yumex to install qt4 and qt4-x11. Then I tried “rpm -Uvh vidalia-0.0.8-3.i386.rpm” but it didn’t work. I’m still a Fedora noob. I guess I have to install as root. That worked.

I wanted Vidalia to control the already-running Tor process that starts as a server, but I could not get that to work. When I thought I had it set up correctly with HashedControlPassword, Vidalia would just start up and kill the Tor process, and then complain “Vidalia was unable to register for Tor events. Control socket is not connected.” I don’t know. I gave up with this route and decided to just let Vidalia start its own Tor process. This meant I had to run “chkconfig tor off” to disable the service from starting.

Now I just start Vidalia when I want to run Tor. Privoxy is still a service.

Remember that Vidalia makes its own torrc file for the Tor instances it starts, so if you had settings you wanted to save, you have to copy them over. Look in $HOME/.vidalia for the file.

2 Comments

  1. Matt said,

    1 November 2007 at 12:29 pm

    Vidalia 0.0.8 is over one year old. You should try 0.0.15 and see if it helps any. Also make sure you are running a recent enough Tor.

  2. kkvv said,

    1 November 2007 at 10:26 pm

    Thanks Matt. I didn’t mean that I followed their example instructions (which were written when 0.0.8 was new) to the letter. I did in fact get 0.0.15. And I’m running tor 0.1.2.17, which is the current release in the stable branch.

    I suspect that I am doing something wrong with my configuration, because the changelog says that since 0.0.8, ” Vidalia will now attempt to connect to an existing Tor’s ControlPort before starting its own Tor process. If it finds a Tor with an open ControlPort, Vidalia will “attach” to that Tor instead of starting a new process.”

    Bugger though, I can’t get it to work like that.

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