In a previous article I’ve wrote in how to set up a tor server. In this tutorial I’ll show how to set up tor graphically to your desktop for anonymous surfing.

Note that tor is an almost perfect system to break censorship while surfing the net. Thanks to its architecture, using tor, a user is able to access blocked domains such as piratebay.org. Tor can also be used also to hide your identity on the web. But be aware of using websites that require logins, in that case your identity is not hiddend at all for them!

To install tor with a graphical user interface you have to install the vidalia package, you can install it from software center or typing in a terminal:

apt-get install vidalia

It will ask you a question about how to control tor from vidalia, ask permanent takeover such that vidalia will start and stop tor. Now start vidalia from a terminal or from the application icon in the application menu list in unity. Vidalia will start tor in background and you can open your browser and set 127.0.0.1:9050 as your SOCKS5 proxy server. You can do this in chrome from command line just typing:

chromium-browser --proxy-server=socks://localhost:9050

Then you can surf torcheck or whatismyipaddress.com to check that you are not using your ip anymore. Torcheck may still say that you are not using tor (it will update after few minutes), if it’s so check that whatismyipaddress does not show your ip address (public one).

Happy free surfing!