[Tor-BSD] How to get Vidalia running under FreeBSD 9.1

[George Rosamond]

George Rosamond:
> Fabian Keil:
>> Richard Childers <fscked at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
>>
>>> In my last message I complained that
>>>
>>> (a) Vidalia did not install Tor or mention that it needed to be 
>>> installed separately,
>>
>> Vidalia doesn't need Tor running on the same system
>> as it can talk to it through the network.
>>
>> The FreeBSD port used to have an optional dependency on Tor, but as Tor
>> had an optional dependency on Vidalia this caused circular dependencies.
>> Thus the optional dependency was removed until the ports framework can
>> deal with it (it still can't).
>>
>> For details see:
>> http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=ports/150078
>> http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=ports/150774
>>
>>> (b) Tor was not available as a package, though evidence indicated it had 
>>> been, recently
>>
>> I don't use third-party packages and can't comment on this.
>>
>>> (c) Vidalia did not work and did not report on why it was not working.
>>
>> Vidalia works for other people and so far you didn't provide any
>> information that could be used to figure out why it didn't "work"
>> for you.
>>
>>> Here's the workaround. Note that Vidalia requires an X Window manager as 
>>> a prerequisite; installation and configuration of X Window managers is 
>>> outside the scope of this document.
>>>
>>> (1) Install Tor as a port.
>>> (2) Do NOT set tor_enable="YES" in /etc/rc.conf
>>> (3) Install Vidalia as a package.
>>> (4) Copy /usr/local/etc/tor/torrc to ~/.vidalia/torrc
>>> (5) Edit ~/.vidalia/torrc, if desired.
>>> (6) Start the Vidalia X client from the command line, running in the 
>>> background:
>>
>> This causes Tor to run with the privileges of the user running Vidalia
>> which doesn't seem like a good idea to me.
>>
>> It's usually done this way on other platforms, but as far as I know that's
>> mainly because the user isn't expected to be able to let Tor run as "service".
>>
>> On FreeBSD, my recommendation is to install Tor in a jail and Vidalia on
>> the host (or on a different system with the traffic tunnelled through ssh).
>>
>> Starting Tor through Vidalia isn't necessary and this way you can run Tor
>> all the time while only running Vidalia when you actually want to use it.
> 
> Okay...
> 
> So the issue is this from what I understand:
> 
> Tor encourages people to use TBB, not Vidalia + Tor + Default Firefox.
> Personally I use Tor + My own hacked Firefox which includes a bunch of
> extras in about:config, plus JS disabled, etc.
> 
> Vidalia will likely not be around in the future.  A UX dev and I worked
> on a project to critique and redesign the UX, and I know others are
> working on doing the actual dev work at this point.  Partially motivated
> by integrating Vidalia's functions into the browser, and partially
> driven by the size of the TBB package, which can't exceed 5M.  This is
> because much of the TBB distribution is over email, and gmail restricts
> attachments to 5M.
> 
> So we should be seeing a TBB that is essentially Tor + Firefox + maybe a
> Firefox Tor add-on.  It's still an open question, but it's the likely
> direction from what I know.
> 
> Therefore, porting TBB to FBSD, for instance, is something of a fading need.
> 

Oh... one more thing...

For FreeBSD, pkgng should mean the end of lag between the package versus
the port, which is pretty frustrating.

I always like pkg_add -u from OpenBSD, especially when using on embedded
system where you don't want to maintain a ports tree.  Then again,
OpenBSD always encourages users to use packages instead of ports.

And FreeBSD should be in the same spot with pkgng at some point.

g