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:

    Opening the Preferences menu in Firefox
  4. Under the General tab, find Network proxy settings:

    Firefox network proxy settings
  5. Setup as shown:

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

    Firefox tor network test

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:

    Saving the tor installation archive from within PureBrowser
  2. When download is completed, click the folder icon to open the Downloads folder:

    Opening the downloads directory within PureBrowser
  3. Double-click the downloaded file to open it:

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

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

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

    Viewing the contents of the downloaded archive
  7. This is what you will see:

    Selecting the start-tor-browser.desktop file

    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. It must be edited 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:

    TorBrowser connection verification

Note

If you wish to upgrade TorBrowser, 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. However, this is not recommended by the tor authors.