Accessing the Tor network

Firefox

1. Install tor if it not already installed on your system. Open a terminal emulator and run the following command:

sudo apt install tor

2. Open a terminal emulator and run the following command to enable and start the tor service:

sudo systemctl enable --now tor.service

3. Launch Firefox and open Preferences:

4. Under the General tab, find Network proxy settings:

5. Setup as shown:

6. Close the settings and open https://check.torproject.org/ to see if you have access to the Tor network:

Tip

Tor authors strongly recommend that you install the TorBrowser to help mitigate the practice of browser fingerprinting.

Installing TorBrowser

Note

Tor is not a “magic bullet” for privacy. Review the Tor Project’s instructions for more information about best practices.

1. Open PureBrowser and navigate to https://www.torproject.org/download/download-easy.html.en. Click to download the Linux, 64-bit version. Choose to save the file and click OK:

2. When download is completed, click the folder icon to open the Downloads folder:

3. Double-click the downloaded file to open it:

4. The file will be opened in archive manager. Click Extract to proceed:

5. Select the folder where the archive will be extracted (in this example, the Desktop folder is used) and click the Extract button in the upper-right corner to unpack the archive:

6. When the extraction is complete, click to show the extracted files:

7. This is what you will see:

The extracted folder is named tor-browser_en-US and that it is placed in the Desktop directory. The file start-tor-browser.desktop is a shortcut file, but we need to edit it to point to the directory where we extracted the TorBrowser archive.

8. Open a terminal emulator and navigate into the extracted folder.

For example, if the file was extracted into the Desktop folder, run the following command:

cd ~/Desktop/tor-browser_en-US

9. Still within the terminal emulator, run the following command to have Tor Browser appear with your other installed apps:

./start-tor-browser.desktop --register-app

10. You should see the following output:

user@Librem15-PureOS:~$ cd ~/Desktop/tor-browser_en-US
user@Librem15-PureOS:~/Desktop/tor-browser_en-US$ ./start-tor-browser.desktop --register-app
Launching './Browser/start-tor-browser --detach --register-app'...
Tor Browser has been registered as a desktop app for this user in ~/.local/share/applications/

11. Launch TorBrowser. When it is configured, open https://check.torproject.org/ to verify that you are using the Tor network:

Note

If you wish to upgrade TorBrowser, simply delete the tor-browser_en-US folder from your Desktop directory and repeat only the steps 1-6!

See also

You can also setup a different browser to access the Tor network, but this is not recommended by the tor` authors.