vidalia bundle

On August 27th, we released Vidalia 0.2.3. This fixes some more bugs with "Who has used by bridge" functionality and switches to Qt signals for event handling.

The updated Vidalia packages can be found at https://www.torproject.org/vidalia

The changes are: read more »

• Create the data directory before trying to copy over the default
  Vidalia configuration file from inside the application bundle on Mac
  OS X. Affects only OS X drag-and-drop installer users without a
  previous Vidalia installation.
• Change all Tor event handling to use Qt's signals and slots mechanism
  instead of custom QEvent subclasses.
• Fix another bug that resulted in the "Who has used my bridge?" link
  initially being visible when the user clicks "Setup Relaying" from
  the control panel if they are running a non-bridge relay.
  (Ticket #509, reported by "vrapp")
• Always hide the "Who has used my bridge?" link when Tor isn't running,
  

As highlighted in the 0.2.2.1-alpha release notes, the Vidalia Bundle for OS X includes some major changes. Many of these are for ease of use and user experience improvements. The release of OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) gave me a fine excuse to release the improvements.

It's best to un-install Tor/Vidalia and then install this new bundle; rather than upgrade. If you want to upgrade, you'll need to update the paths for Tor and Polipo in the Vidalia Settings window.

There has been a lot of testing since this test release of the drag and drop installer for OS X in January. The main goal was to make installation far easier, less error prone, and keep all of the bundle in a single directory for easier configuration and un-installation. read more »

Tor 0.2.2.1-alpha disables ".exit" address notation by default, allows
Tor clients to bootstrap on networks where only port 80 is reachable,
makes it more straightforward to support hardware crypto accelerators,
and starts the groundwork for gathering stats safely at relays.

https://www.torproject.org/download

We've been improving our packages and bundles:
Packaging changes: read more »

• Upgrade Vidalia from 0.1.15 to 0.2.3 in the Windows and OS X
  installer bundles. See
  https://trac.vidalia-project.net/browser/vidalia/tags/vidalia-0.2.3/CHAN...
  for details of what's new in Vidalia 0.2.3.
• Windows Vidalia Bundle: update Privoxy from 3.0.6 to 3.0.14-beta.
• OS X Vidalia Bundle: move to Polipo 1.0.4 with Tor specific
  configuration file, rather than the old Privoxy.
• OS X Vidalia Bundle: Vidalia, Tor, and Polipo are compiled as
  x86-only for better compatibility with OS X 10.6, aka Snow Leopard.

A while ago there was a thread on OR-TALK that devolved into

"why does Tor still ship ancient privoxy?"

and

"why are you shipping polipo with the Tor Browser Bundle instead of current privoxy?"

For those interested, the thread is here, http://archives.seul.org/or/talk/Jul-2009/msg00063.html.

Scott had a good argument for why we should update the bundles to the latest privoxy, and I agree, we should. But then I started thinking about why we needed a proxy at all. Almost all browsers support socks5 direct, isn't that faster than a middleman proxy?

This got me thinking about why polipo is in the TBB, but not the other packages. The TBB "feels faster" when using Tor than using the installed Tor, Vidalia, and Privoxy. However, I couldn't find any actual testing of performance of polipo vs. privoxy vs. socks5 direct. read more »

I asked for community feedback in this post about drag and drop installation of the Vidalia bundle for Apple's OS X. In working with the Vidalia team, we now have a drag and drop installer. This is experimental. It's designed for a clean install. It won't migrate your settings, nor will it configure anything for you. Upon installing, your milk may sour and your salt may run off with your pepper. Now that the disclaimers are over, here's what it contains and does do for you. read more »

It includes Universal binaries for:

• Vidalia version 0.2.0-svn r3425
• Polipo 1.0.4 configured to use Tor as a socksproxy
• Tor 0.2.1.10-alpha compiled with prefix and bindir set to /Applications/Vidalia.app

A few weeks ago, I watched some non-technical OS X users attempt to install the Vidalia-Tor Bundle. Many of them tried to drag the installation package to Applications. A few were surprised it required an installation at all.

In Vidalia trunk I committed a different way to install Vidalia, Tor, and Polipo. In this new dmg, you just open it up and drag the Vidalia icon into Applications. You now have Tor, Vidalia, and Polipo pre-configured and running completely out of Applications. While this works well for users that never installed Tor/Vidalia before, it doesn't work so well for existing installations.

Is it smart to think users will un-install their existing Vidalia/Tor bundle before using the drag and drop installation method? My inclination is that it isn't smart. This installation method also removes the ability to automatically install Torbutton for Firefox. read more »

Jacob Appelbaum joins us to help out with:

• developing a translation portal. This should help us find translators
  and make their updates easier.
• coordinating the Tor translation team and getting parts that need
  translating, translated.
• helping to better document Tor for non-technical users.
• writing an auto-responder to use Google's gmail to deliver Tor to
  users who request it
• helping to get auto-updating for Tor and Vidalia working seamlessly
• maintaining the code that runs the tor exitlist
• generally advocating Tor

Matt Edman joins the Tor Project. Matt joins to help us enhance Tor's
interactions with Vidalia. Specifically, he's working on:

• integrating upnp libraries into vidalia to make it easier to setup servers
• displaying Tor's startup status more visually in Vidalia to help users
  understand what's going on as Tor starts
• assist with making translating Vidalia's interface and help files
  easier for translators
• helping to flesh out proposals in queue on or-dev
• helping to get auto-updating or Tor and Vidalia working seamlessly
• tackling the "matt" section of the TODO file.

Welcome Jacob and Matt!

It appears Qt-4.3.3 has a bug that is causing Vidalia to crash when the list of Tor nodes refreshes and is sorted. The current 0.1.2.19-stable and 0.2.0.17-alpha bundles for OSX are built against Qt-4.3.3.

I've downgraded the build hosts to Qt-4.3.2. The rebuilt OSX vidalia-bundle packages for both 0.1.2.19-stable and 0.2.0.17-alpha are available as:

• Bundle with 0.1.2.19-stable and Vidalia 16a
• Bundle with 0.2.0.17-alpha and Vidalia 16a

These bundles contain Vidalia compiled with Qt-4.3.2. This makes Vidalia happy again.