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Date: Mon, 23 Sep 2013 12:54:34 +0300 From: "J.C." <jc80@riseup.net> To: tor-relays@lists.torproject.org Subject: [tor-relays] Future versions and Vidalia? Message-ID: <52400FDA.2060309@riseup.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
Are all future versions of Tor Browser Bundle going to have Vidalia permanently stripped? I'm running a stable relay on Linux with the TBB (and thus, Vidalia) instead of installing the Tor packages, and i quite like it this way. I don't remember what exactly went wrong, but some months ago i tried to get a relay running by installing and configuring it with the terminal and failed miserably, even though i was following instructions to the letter. I could try again but i'm a huge fan of the "if it's not broken, don't touch it" approach, and my relay works fantastic right now.
If Vidalia is going to be permanently dropped at some point, is there any other way to continue running a relay than the terminal? I had a look at TBBv3 and didn't find a way to enable relaying. I'm in exactly the same boat. I would _highly_ recommend that the current TBB stay exactly the way it is. I'm against having a ton of services start up by themselves. As a Linux user, I enjoy having the power to control what I start things up, and when. Sometimes I start my computer and I don't want certain things to start. The disadvantage of having a service install is that I lose much of that control. I too have tried to set up a Tor relay via packages and such, and I also failed. The TBB was orders of magnitude easier: I just click "configure relay" and things work fine. Vidalia is also extremely easy to use, and I like the interface. I would advise that the dev team reconsider.
Jesse V. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.11 (GNU/Linux) iQF8BAEBCgBmBQJSQPJhXxSAAAAAAC4AKGlzc3Vlci1mcHJAbm90YXRpb25zLm9w ZW5wZ3AuZmlmdGhob3JzZW1hbi5uZXQxMjgyMjhENjEyODQ1OTU1NzBCMjgwRkFB RDk3MzY0RkMyMEJFQzgwAAoJEK2XNk/CC+yAWX4H/jp1DlCgdJqRQd9I0pVpozDu VlA75uAtFxIM0VYr+eIVuC2OqQHUUFZLYNwFfePUZvIxy9bedL5WlkdZQCsaenaY wu3sLMpoBz8cH2qM/Ne5JIiFCTUEOL7XwA5d8ehdGSmnZUaBXANwiJ23uh2eVpeE HKvU/bnS5wp0YG7x/xHyQ5SGCpyWXb5H7LnGtNol9GTvbTgepo9rHtVmUCgdA5Wg BJe1yXAy/lAv5GjloejBtTu4whPuZOuY5FU+1LRHt3wnShLgEMy7UXeVQpAK2pDa mEvKD75aIb2AevGAsSdqBs2FsOOimQ7FrWudH3aZHYB6g5+nfOouLxBVcDoVjts= =Bjy+ -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
On 09/24/2013 04:01 AM, Jesse Victors wrote:
Are all future versions of Tor Browser Bundle going to have Vidalia permanently stripped? I'm in exactly the same boat. I would _highly_ recommend that the current TBB stay exactly the way it is.
Not going to happen. For years, nobody has picked up Vidalia, and it is way too confusing for most users to have another, separate program launched together with the browser (and even added to their Quicklaunch list or whatever you call it). There will still be Vidalia relay bundles independent from Tor *Browser* Bundle.
I'm against having a ton of services start up by themselves. As a Linux user, I enjoy having the power to control what I start things up, and when. Sometimes I start my computer and I don't want certain things to start. The disadvantage of having a service install is that I lose much of that control. I too have tried to set up a Tor relay via packages and such, and I also failed.
Nobody is forcing you to have Tor auto-start, like nobody is forcing you to have TBB auto-start. You can run Tor as you would run TBB. Especially as a Linux user, you really should learn enough about how your system behaves to make a simple change such as remove a service: update-rc.d tor disable
The TBB was orders of magnitude easier: I just click "configure relay" and things work fine. Vidalia is also extremely easy to use, and I like the interface. I would advise that the dev team reconsider.
Honestly? Tor from a repository is so much nicer than having to update TBB by hand, and reconfigure it every time there's an update. All you have to do is add the Torproject repository, once, install Tor from it, once, and configure your /etc/tor/torrc, once. You can copy most (if not all) of the settings from your TBB torrc to that file, done. Please understand it's not much a matter of decision. Developer resources are very scarce, the old maintainer long gone, and nobody seems to pick up Vidalia. It's not like it was decided to simply drop it. It had to go, with way too many bugs piling up, and people emailing help desk almost every day being confused about the separate application that most users never need. Free software is about freeing the users. Freedom comes at a price, and that price is some investment into understanding the systems. It is totally fine to not know, but if you want to be able to benefit from that freedom, you really need to understand the basic principles underlying a Linux distribution and its packages. Once you learned them, once, it takes a fraction of the time installing and setting up Tor properly, compared to downloading TBB for every update. -- Moritz Bartl https://www.torservers.net/
participants (2)
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Jesse Victors -
Moritz Bartl