Running Tor and Vidalia

Tor is free software and an open network that helps you defend against a form of network surveillance that threatens personal freedom and privacy[...]

Read more about the tor at https://www.torproject.org/

It is a very nice software that I have been using on windows and also wanted to use with linux. Luckily, there is a nice and easy to follow installation manual for Ubuntu, HERE. It is very easy to set it up and running, so I won't copy all the commands in here.

One thing to note though is that after installing, tor is ran on startup and when you want to start Vidalia (tor's UI for settings etc.) it will detect the running tor process and try to connect to it. This isn't working (or not for me at least) so before starting vidalia, make sure to kill off the running tor process

sudo killall tor

This command can be ran even on startup to make things easier and clear. After this vidalia can be started normally.

Edit

Its even easier to remove tor from your runlevel, preventing executing it at startup in the first place. If done this way, there is no need to kill tor at startup manually and vidalia will start it by itself fresh, guaranteeing that it runs as intended. Simply run
sudo update-rc.d -f tor remove

Others

One more thing, I remember having some trouble in the settings, but its like this at the moment:

 

I think once I had to set Authentication for "cookie" because it just wouldn't want to work with password, but apparently now it does, so I'm happy.

To use tor when browsing I'm using GProxy Toolbar for Firefox, a simple toolbar that lets me witch between proxies quickly without having to open the browser net configuration. Its set like this: