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Tor is free software and an open network that helps you defend against a form of network surveillance that threatens personal freedom and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, and state security known as traffic analysis.

The Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat final release is very close (23 days) yet so many repositories are not ready for it: GetDeb, Medibuntu and many others. So we must find alternatives to install some applications.

TOR was available in a PPA for Ubuntu (sevenmachines) which has been deleted. There is also an official TOR Ubuntu repository which unfortunately has also not been updated for Maverick, just like the repositories I mentioned above. But the Lucid packages work just fine - I'm running it on Maverick for a month now and everything works. So here is how to add this repository in Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat and install TOR:


1. Add the Lucid repository in Maverick and install TOR, Privoxy and Vidalia:

echo "deb http://deb.torproject.org/torproject.org experimental-lucid main" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list
sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys 886DDD89

Then, along with TOR you may also want to install Vidalia (a GUI for TOR) and Privoxy (non-caching web proxy with advanced filtering capabilities):
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install vidalia privoxy tor

2. This is optional - if you want to use TOR as a SOCKS5 proxy, also follow these steps:

Edit the Privoxy config file:
sudo gedit /etc/privoxy/config

And paste this at the bottom of the file, then save it:
forward-socks5   /               127.0.0.1:9050 .

Yes, there's a space and a dot at the end.

3. Restart TOR and Privoxy to complete the process:
sudo /etc/init.d/tor restart
sudo /etc/init.d/privoxy restart

For a new guide on installing and using Tor in recent Ubuntu releases (18.04+), see THIS page.