Practice anonymity with the Tor Browser. Here’s how to install Tor on a Linux desktop. Ubuntu users beware: The Tor Project recommends not installing Tor from the regular Ubuntu software repositories.
What is Tor?
In normal speech, we use the terms «Internet» and «Internet» interchangeably. But in fact, the Internet and the Internet are two different things. If websites were premises—shops, factories, entertainment centers—the Internet would be roads and highways connecting them together.
The Internet supports many services. The World Wide Web is just one of them. Other services such as email, RDP, DNS, NNTP are provided over the Internet and none of them is a website.
Overlay networks also use the Internet. The Tor network (The Onion Router) is one such overlay network. It provides anonymity and privacy for users. With Tor, if you use it effectively, no one can trace your activity back to your IP address.
The traffic that passes through the Tor network is encrypted. While this helps keep the people using it anonymous, the encryption causes network problems. The normal routing and switching elements of the Internet cannot handle Tor network traffic.
The Tor relay network, hosted and maintained by volunteers, does the switching and routing instead. Tor relays intentionally drop your connection between multiple relays, even if that routing is not required to reach your destination. This «bouncing» is another reason why Tor makes it nearly impossible to track and identify the person on the far end.
It is the strength of this anonymity that has led to the Tor network being used to host many websites that engage in criminal activities. The Tor network forms the bulk of the dark web. However, this is not all illegal activity on the Tor network. Dissidents in repressive regimes, anonymous press sources, whistleblowers, activists, and the military use Tor for legitimate reasons.
The problem is that the very thing that makes him attractive to these people is what makes him attractive to the bad guys.
Tor hidden services have addresses ending in the «.onion» suffix. They will not appear on Google and they cannot be viewed or accessed using a normal internet browser. You must use the Tor browser to visit these sites, but you can also use it to access regular sites with additional anonymity.
RELATED: How to access .onion sites (also known as Tor hidden services)
How to install the Tor Browser
Note that the Tor Project does not recommend installing pre-packaged versions of the Tor Browser from the Ubuntu repositories, saying they have not «been reliably updated» by the Ubuntu community in the past. Install it only from the official Tor Project website. The Tor Project also offers official repositories for Ubuntu and Debian, but the following instructions will work on any Linux distribution.
Go to the Tor project download page and click on the penguin.
If your browser prompts you to open or save the file, select the option to save the file.
Let’s say the file is saved in the Downloads directory.
When future versions of the Tor Browser are released, the version numbers in the file name will change. Also, part of the file name indicates the language. In this example, «en-US» means English, United States.
If you downloaded a version in another language, or are following these instructions in the future when the browser version has changed, replace the filenames and directory names you are actually working with with the filenames and directory names. used in these instructions.
The downloaded file is a .tar.xz file. We need to unzip and unpack it so that we can use its contents.
RELATED: How to extract files from a .tar.gz or .tar.bz2 file on Linux
There are several ways to do this. If you right-click a file, a context menu will appear. Select «Extract Here» from the menu.
If your context menu doesn’t have an «Extract Here» option, close it and double-click the downloaded file. Your file manager can extract the contents of the file for you.
If that doesn’t work, open a terminal window in your downloads directory and use the following command. Note that the «J» in xvJf is in upper case.
tar -xvJf tor-browser-linux64-8.5.1_ru-US.tar.xz
So one way or another, the file will be decompressed and unzipped for you. A new directory will be created in the Downloads folder.
Double-click the new directory to have the file manager navigate to that directory. Like Russian dolls, there is another directory inside the first one.
Run from directory or install system?
You have a choice here.
Now that you have downloaded and unzipped the Tor Browser, you can continue using it without any additional installation steps. Or you can integrate more closely with the installation at the system level.
The operation of the Tor Browser is the same in both cases, and security updates and bug fixes will find and update the browser either way.
You may prefer the Tor Browser to have as light a touch as possible on your computer. If you feel happier not having the Tor browser built into your system, that’s fine. You will be just as anonymous and protected when you use it directly from this directory as if you were using it after installing it at the system level. If this is your preferred approach, follow the instructions in Using the Tor Browser from the Tor Directory.
If you want Tor Browser to be recognized as an installed application in your desktop environment and to appear in the application menu and when searching for applications, follow the instructions in the System Level Integration section.
Using the Tor Browser from the Tor Directory
To launch the Tor Browser directly from the directory, open a terminal window at that location and enter the following command:
./tor-browser_en-US/Browser/start-tor-browser &
Now you can skip this article in the How to set up the Tor Browser section.
System level integration
Open a terminal window at this location. To install the Tor Browser to the system folder, you need to move this directory tor-browser_en-US to catalog /opt . This is the usual location for user programs in Linux. We can do this with the following command. Please note that you need to use sudo and you will be prompted for a password.
sudo mv tor-browser_en-US / opt
The folder will move to a new location and disappear from the file manager window. In the terminal window, change the directory so you end up in the directory /opt/tor-browser_en-US .
cd / opt / tor-browser_en-US
Using ls to view the contents of this directory, we see another directory and a file with the extension «.desktop». We need to run the «.desktop» file to register the application in your workbench.
Ls
./start-tor-browser.desktop --register-app
How to launch the Tor Browser
The above installation sequence has been tested on current Ubuntu, Fedora and Manjaro Linux distributions. Pressing the Super key (the one between the Ctrl and Alt keys in the left hand) and pressing the «tor» key brought up the Tor Browser icon in all cases.
