[tor-relays] Ubuntu Focal

ronqtorrelays at risley.net ronqtorrelays at risley.net
Mon Jun 1 13:37:12 UTC 2020


> On May 31, 2020, at 09:49, Pac-Man <rfburner at protonmail.com> wrote:
> 
> When will there be support for Ubuntu 20.04 LTS? There does not seem to be a repo setup where you can use focal.

I assume that you're trying to follow the instructions on 

https://2019.www.torproject.org/docs/debian.html.en

and you're frustrated by the fact that the tool doesn't give a source list for Ubuntu 20.04, in spite of the warning to "Do not use the packages in Ubuntu's universe. In the past they have not reliably been updated. That means you could be missing stability and security fixes."

Since 20.04 has been out less than two months, I'm not entirely surprised that the web page hasn't been updated yet.

You could just ignore the warning, and install from the default Ubuntu repos:

sudo apt install tor

which will give you Tor version 0.4.2.7. Then, given the warning above, watch for the debian installation page to be updated and switch to a Tor repo as soon as one is available, thus addressing the "not reliably updated" concerns.

Perhaps even better, I just tried using the instructions for bionic, but substituting "focal" for "bionic" in the /etc/apt/sources.list file. That gave me a quite-current Tor version 0.4.3.5. So the repo is apparently actually available, it's just that the web page hasn't been updated yet.

The actual commands I used:

Append to /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb https://deb.torproject.org/torproject.org focal main
deb-src https://deb.torproject.org/torproject.org focal main

Install the repo signing key:

apt install gnupg2 dirmngr ; \
wget https://deb.torproject.org/torproject.org/A3C4F0F979CAA22CDBA8F512EE8CBC9E886DDD89.asc ; \
apt-key add <A3C4F0F979CAA22CDBA8F512EE8CBC9E886DDD89.asc ; \
apt update ; \
apt install tor deb.torproject.org-keyring

Sorry that you had a frustrating experience. Tor is a volunteer effort and Ubuntu 20.04 is pretty bleeding-edge given that it was just released in April. Often the documentation lags a bit. I have run into a number of well-maintained commercial packages that don't yet have official support for focal, so I think you were simply a victim of unfortunate timing.

--(just a Tor supporter and relay operator, not in any way a spokesperson for torproject.org)Ron


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