Quickstart version for users: -1) If you don't have libevent, install it. Source is at http://www.monkey.org/~provos/libevent/ . 0) Download the absolute newest version. No, really. http://tor.eff.org/dist/ 1) tar xvf it, and then cd into the directory. 2) ./configure 3) make 4) make install (as root if necessary) 5) tor (if it doesn't work, give it the whole path or fix your path) You don't need to run this as root, and you probably shouldn't. (If you're having problems, try running it with "-l info" to get more details.) 6) point your browser to socks4 or socks5 proxy at localhost port 9050. In mozilla, this is in edit|preferences|advanced|proxies. This allows you to test to make sure tor is installed correctly. (If you have a personal firewall, be sure to allow local connections to port 9050.) (If your firewall blocks outgoing connections, punch a hole so it can connect to TCP *:9001-9004 and *:9031-9033) (If you're using Safari as your browser, keep in mind that OS X before 10.3 claims to support socks but does not. You must do step 8.) 7) make sure you've set it up correctly: go to http://www.junkbusters.com/cgi-bin/privacy and see what IP it says you're coming from. If it works, you should probably go on to step 8, to get better privacy. 8) Optionally, install privoxy (www.privoxy.org), and add the line "forward-socks4a / localhost:9050 ." (without the quotes -- don't forget the dot) to its config file. Then change your mozilla to http proxy at localhost port 8118 (and no socks proxy). You should also set your SSL proxy to the same thing, to hide your https traffic. Using privoxy will give you good html scrubbing as well. (See doc/CLIENTS for why direct socks gives you less anonymity.) *****If this works for you, you can stop reading here****** If you got the source from cvs: Run "./autogen.sh", which will run the various auto* programs and then run ./configure for you. From there, start at step 3 in the quickstart list above. If the quickstart doesn't work for you: Starting with Tor 0.1.0.0, Tor uses libevent for its asynchronous networking core. If you don't have libevent, you'll need to install it. You can get it at http://www.monkey.org/~provos/libevent/. If you have problems finding libraries, try CPPFLAGS="-I/usr/local/include" LDFLAGS="-L/usr/local/lib" \ ./configure rather than simply ./configure. If you have mysterious autoconf failures while linking openssl, consider setting your LD_LIBRARY_PATH to the openssl lib directory. For example, "setenv LD_LIBRARY_PATH /usr/athena/lib". Check out the list archives at http://archives.seul.org/or/dev/ and see if somebody else has reported your problem. If not, please subscribe and let us know what you did to fix it, or give us the details and we'll see what we can do.