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Do you want completely anonymous internet access? For Free? 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.

Here is how to set it up

First things first get tor.

I prefer to grab the latest version and compile to source but I will give you the quick and easy way.

This will apt get tor and the dependencies, wget vidalia, extract and cd to the directory and configure for you.

sudo apt-get install tor qt4-dev-tools qt4-designer

wget http://vidalia-project.net/dist/vidalia-0.0.13.tar.gz

tar zxvf vidalia-0.0.13.tar.gz

cd vidalia-0.0.13

export QMAKE=/usr/bin/qmake-qt4

./configure --disable-debug

then just type

sudo make install

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
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

I hope you enjoy my first tutorial on ubuntu privacy concerns. I hope many more people use tor and set up a server to anonymize the world.

Tags: configure tor with gui, configuring Vidalia GUI for tor in ubuntu, General, tor feisty, tor ubuntu, Vidalia GUI for tor, vidalia screenshotsconfigure tor with gui, configuring Vidalia GUI for tor in ubuntu, General, tor feisty, tor ubuntu, Vidalia GUI for tor, vidalia screenshots

This thought just struck me: the GNOME “save file” icon is still an image of a floppy (or it is at least in Gnumeric). How many people still remember what a floppy looks like?

Should the save icon be replaced by something else (a picture of a cd/usb drive)? Or should floppy discs be “icon”ized forever?
Somehow, all these days, the above thought never occurred to me. That icon with a floppy drive in it meant “Save” and to be honest, I have failed to think “floppy” when I have seen the icon before.