"Patrick Schleizer" wrote: To rephrase this proposal in an alternative way... At the moment, when you download the TBB package, your only chance to use tor-launcher/Tor/pluggable transports is to also start Tor Browser. No way to do that without starting Tor Browser. What is being suggested here, is an option to just start tor-launcher/Tor/pluggable transports without starting Tor Browser. Then tor-launcher/Tor/pluggable transports could be used for the usual applications that can be torified. And when the user wants to start Tor Browser, it would just connect to the already running tor-launcher/Tor/pluggable transports (if not already running).
Okay, that's clearer. So you're proposing to provide a launcher that makes loading Tor Browser optional? That can already be done manually as I'm sure you're aware. Download the TBB bundle then delete the tor-launcher extension. Now you can start the tor process via symlink or simple script. Then you can start/close/relaunch Tor Browser via a simple script on a whim while keeping the Tor process completely separate. 1. After extracting TBB, navigate to the folder /Browser/TorBrowser/Data/Browser/profile.default/extensions and delete the tor-launcher xpi (:(). 2. Create your script to launch the tor process with your chosen options from Tor's documentation. Use this with your preferred method/shell to launch tor's process automatically or manually. 3. Create another script to launch Tor Browser. Here you need to make sure you export LD_LIBRARY_PATH to the location of libstdc++.so.6 included with TBB. After extraction this would be /Browser/TorBrowser/Tor/ -- and relative to root. Then in the same script execute the firefox binary including the options --class and -profile. The -profile option is relative to launch. An example would be ./Browser/firefox --class "Tor Browser" -profile /Browser/TorBrowser/Data/Browser/profile.default . Now you can use your preferred method/shell to launch Tor Browser whenever needed. Loading Tor Browser will be completely separate from the Tor process and closing Tor Browser won't terminate the active Tor process. Neither will it load the Tor process automatically (:(). 4. Load Tor Browser for the first time. You'll get an error about not being properly configured. Click on the Tor Button icon and select Preferences. Change Proxy Setting to Use custom proxy settings. Make sure SOCKS Host has the address of your Tor process (default localhost) and that the value for Port matches whatever is specified in your custom torrc or torrc-default. If you now type about:tor into the address or reload Tor Browser you should get Congratulations. These settings will persist on every launch of Tor Browser until you replace the install. 5. Reuse scripts for any install of TBB having the same directory structure. That should be it. Should be a solution until further consideration of your proposal yields a better result for you. --leeroy -- tor-talk mailing list - tor-talk@lists.torproject.org To unsubscribe or change other settings go to https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk
