Zack Weinberg:
How technically difficult would it be to remove Vidalia from an already-packaged TBB?
For *nix? I'd say trivial, once you figured out how (with basic sysadmin skills).
Win*: no idea.
Continuing for *nix...
As for the figure out part, for TBB stable, see: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/TorifyHOWTO/WebBrowsers#Us...
Should be also helpful with little modification: https://whonix.org/wiki/Manually_Updating_Tor_Browser
For TBB Alpha, notice that: ## Deactivate tor-launcher, ## a Vidalia replacement as browser extension, ## to prevent running Tor over Tor. ## https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/6009 ## https://gitweb.torproject.org/tor-launcher.git export TOR_SKIP_LAUNCH=1
(Ideally something that could be put into a
shell script.)
Yes, its just a shell script modification or custom startup script.
Basically what I want is a more-current-than-ESR10
browser that uses a system-installed & -configured Tor instance.
I wouldn't miss the Torbutton UI, either (it should just use Tor all
the time).
All possible.
You don't need to modify any TB (Tor Browser) socks settings, if you open a local Tor SocksPort 9150 in torrc. And for ControlPort, just open a Tor ControlPort on 9151.
If Tor is running on a different machine, running rinetd on 127.0.0.1:9150 and 9151 and forwarding to other IP/port can do the trick as well.
Not sure what you want to do, but I am quite confident I can help out due to my experience of getting Tor Browser to run in Whonix, where Tor is running on a separate machine.