Technology Preview: Marble and Vidalia-0.2.0

phobos — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 18:21:39 -0700

One of the most requested upgrades to Vidalia is a better map of the world. We looked into a few different technologies and decided on KDE's Marble interface. Marble enables an accurate mapping of nodes according to their geolocation, allows for future enhancements such as "click a country to start or end your Tor circuit", and plugins for extra data views. This also gives us the ability to use Qt's Webkit browser to display custom information about nodes, circuits, or anything else in a pop-up window. An anonymous funder covered the costs involved in developing this feature. We thank them for their support.

I've attached some screenshots to this blog post. You can download the relevant packages from the Vidalia website. If you want marble-enabled Vidalia, look for -marble- in the file name. Please report bugs on Vidalia's Bug Tracker.

As of this release, there are now two branches of Vidalia, stable and alpha. The first release of the alpha branch is Vidalia 0.2.0. The stable branch is at Vidalia 0.1.12.

One last big change for OS X users is the drag and drop installer. There is no migration of old settings to new, nor do we clean up the old installs in /Library/Tor, /Library/Vidalia, /Library/Torbutton, /Library/Privoxy, etc. Follow these instructions for how to remove the old vidalia-tor bundles from your computer if you want to completely test this alpha branch of Vidalia. We will figure out a better way to do this in the near future.

Remember, this is a technology preview. However, OS X installs are migrating to drag and drop. I've solely used Vidalia 0.2.0 and drag-and-drop installer for 3 months now. I even previously blogged about it.

Additional changes in alpha Vidalia 0.2.0:

Qt 4.5.0 is used for Win32 and OS X Universal packages.
We've switched from the Nullsoft Installer to the Microsoft System Installer (msi) for better integration with Microsoft Windows.
There are non-Marble and Marble-enabled packages for Win32 and OS X Universal. OS X PowerPC based on OS X 10.3.9 isn't supported by Qt 4.5.x, therefore Marble-enabled Vidalia is not available
Add support for changing UI languages without having to restart Vidalia.
Add preliminary support for using the KDE Marble widget for the network map. It's currently a compile-time option and is disabled by default.
Add support for displaying Tor's plaintext port warnings. Also gives the user the option to disable future warnings.
Add an interface for displaying the geographic distribution of clients who have recently used a bridge operator's relay.
Add tooltips to tree items in the help browser's table of contents. Some of the help topic labels are a bit long.
Switch to a simpler About dialog and move the license information to a separate HTML-formatted display.
Switch to a simpler drag-and-drop installer in the OS X bundles.
Switch to an MSI-based installer on Windows.
Clear the list of default CA certificates used by QSslSocket before adding the only one we care about. Suggested by coderman.
Support building with Visual Studio again.
Add a Debian package structure from dererk.
Updated Albanian, Czech, Finnish, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Swedish, Turkish and many other translations.

Experimental OS X Drag and Drop Vidalia Bundle Installer

phobos — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 08:26:22 -0800

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.

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

You can download them along with the pgp signature and the SHA-1 hash. **Update 2009-01-22 changed packages to r3467 of Vidalia and updated Tor to 0.2.1.11-alpha.

It's a self-contained disk image that has 3 items. The Vidalia.app package, a README.txt, and a folder full of licenses. There is a pretty background for the disk image courtesy of dr|z3d, and a link to the /Applications folder. And while everything is in a simple dmg file, this is not a Tor Browser Bundle for OS X. Running the applications out of the dmg may work, but OS X writes to plist files, caches, and other things all over the installed system. Please wait until we can properly create a TBB for OS X; for this is not it. However, if you are interested in helping out with a TBB for OS X, we're happy to have you help.

Installation is literally this: "Drag the Vidalia icon to the Applications folder". Boom. Done. Vidalia, Tor, and Polipo are installed. Go to your Applications folder and double-click the Vidalia icon. Everything should work out of the box. All bets are off if you have a pre-configured Tor, Vidalia, Polipo, or Privoxy.

Here is a running CHANGELOG of what's new in Vidalia 0.2.0-svn. One of the changes is that your Vidalia data directory is no longer ~/.vidalia/ but ~/Library/Vidalia. If you don't have a vidalia.conf in ~/Library/Vidalia, there is a sample vidalia.conf in /Applications/Vidalia.app/Contents/Resources that is copied to ~/Library/Vidalia to make this bundle work.

The changes to Polipo are documented. See the README file for some details.

The only change to Tor are the parameters passed to configure:
"CFLAGS="-O -g -mmacosx-version-min=10.4 -isysroot /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.4u.sdk -arch i386 -arch ppc" LDFLAGS="-Wl,-syslibroot,/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.4u.sdk"
CONFDIR=/Applications/Vidalia.app
./configure --prefix=/Applications/Vidalia.app --bindir=/Applications/Vidalia.app
--sysconfdir=/Library --disable-dependency-tracking". And edit the Makefile to remove the tests for /Library/Tor.

The goal is to make it easier for users to install the Vidalia Bundle and get Tor working. Using Vidalia to configure Tor is recommended. I don't know if this is the final direction, but enough people have trouble installing and configuring our packages in OS X, this is worth a test.

I look forward to your feedback. Thanks!