408. Briefly: Tor on Debian -- the quick option

Tor can -- under the right conditions -- be used to anonymize your connection. Encryption, anonymity etc. is a minefield is you want to do it right, and I won't pretend to be an expert, so do your own reading.

Anyway.

In the process of looking at manually setting up Tor on Debian I came across the Tor browser bundle. Using it is pretty straightforward, but given that linux users are at varying skill-levels, a step by step guide with pictures can't hurt (and another post for me...).

sudo mkdir /opt/torbundle
sudo chown $USER:$USER /opt/torbundle
cd /opt/torbundle
wget https://www.torproject.org/dist/torbrowser/linux/tor-browser-gnu-linux-x86_64-2.3.25-6-dev-en-US.tar.gz
tar xvf tor-browser-gnu-linux-x86_64-2.3.25-6-dev-en-US.tar.gz
echo "alias torbrowser='/opt/torbundle/tor-browser_en-US/./start-tor-browser'" >> ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc

Start by typing

torbrowser

Vidalia will open, and once you're connected to the tor network a browser session will automatically open.

Vidalia

407. Building less (458) as a temporary solution on Debian Jessie

Currently less conflicts with man-db/yelp/gnome-core/gnome on debian jessie. There are probably ways of overriding the conflict, but I prefer to simply compile my own less and install it.

Note that this doesn't take into account WHY less and man-db are listed as conflicting for versions of less below 4.5.6. I simply want less and the way to do it is to compile an approved version of less.

sudo apt-get install build-essential checkinstall
wget http://www.greenwoodsoftware.com/less/less-458.tar.gz
tar xvf less-458.tar.gz
cd less-458/
./configure
make
sudo checkinstall

0 -  Maintainer: [ root@niobium ]
1 -  Summary: [ less 4.5.8 ]
2 -  Name:    [ less ]
3 -  Version: [ 458 ]
4 -  Release: [ 1 ]
5 -  License: [ GPL ]
6 -  Group:   [ checkinstall ]
7 -  Architecture: [ amd64 ]
8 -  Source location: [ less-458 ]
9 -  Alternate source location: [  ]
10 - Requires: [  ]
11 - Provides: [ less ]
12 - Conflicts: [  ]
13 - Replaces: [  ]

406. Briefly: Missing package in debian wheezy -- forgot apt-pinning settings

In the off-chance that someone for some reason has made the same mistake as I have...

Wheezy is now stable and while that's all fine and dandy, when trying to install tor I kept on getting errors along the lines of

Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
Package tor is not available, but is referred to by another package.
This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or
is only available from another source

aptitude show tor

gave

No current or candidate version found for tor
Package: tor
State: not installed
Version: 0.2.3.25-1
Priority: optional

and

apt-cache policy tor

tor:
  Installed: (none)
  Candidate: (none)
  Version table:
     0.2.3.25-1 0
        -10 http://ftp.iinet.net.au/debian/debian/ wheezy/main amd64 Packages

I got similar errors for e.g. wine and virtualbox.
The solution is in the output of apt-cache -- I set up apt-pinning a long time ago (for mpich2?) and forgot about it.

cat /etc/apt/preferences

Package: *
Pin: release a=testing
Pin-Priority: 990

Package: *
Pin: release a=unstable
Pin-Priority: -10

Package: *
Pin: release a=stable
Pin-Priority: -10

Well, wheezy is now stable (and I am tracking wheezy only in my sources.list now) so the problem was quickly solved by simply deleting /etc/apt/preferences.