Hello everybody
I am quite new to Linux, so I already apologize if I use terms incorrectly! I am dealing with a problem for a few days now and I am just able to solve it by myself and my online research, so hopefully somebody can help me out.
There is a
TLDR; at the end of the post, if somebody does not want to read through all of this.
my situation:
I installed Linux Mint 19.1 Tessa x86_64 with Cinnamon 4.0.10. Now what I try to do is installing Tor Browser, which I finally after 3 days of hustle was able to do. Quick explanation regarding this: First I tried to install it as I did with my other applications via
apt-get install torbrowser-launcher, now the problem was that I had a PGP signing key issue. After I finally managed somehow to wrap the concept of PGP signing around my head more or less, I had this issue where there always were signing problems. I later found out after that it probably was due to poisoned PGP certificates [
1]. So I tried a lot of stuff then with those helpful posts and articles [
2] [
3] and at the end managed to change the keyserver in my
~/.gnupg/dirmngr.conf to
keyserver hkps://keys.openpgp.org.
Question 1: Is this in general a good idea or did I miss anything on that topic that could be done better?
So at the end I removed torbrowser-launcher again and downloaded it directly from
https://www.torproject.org/download/ as a tar.xz file and signed it with the tar.xz.asc signature from their website. Now I have to say I am quite unfamiliar with how the whole 'installing software on Linux'-process should be done correctly, so far as mentioned I usually used
apt-get install to install my software. Now as far as I understood the FHS [
4] somehow correctly I should copy the extracted application folder to
/opt.
Question 2: Is this done correctly or should the application folder be somewhere else?
Now I am at the state where I can run the Tor Browser, but I can not add it to the preferred applications. If I go in the GUI to System Settings > Preferred Applications and then try to pick Tor Browser as Web standard application it does not even show up in the dropdown menu.
So what I found out is that there is a file
~/.config/mimeapps.list which lists up all kind of applications and also has 2 lines regarding how to handle http & https links:
Code:
x-scheme-handler/http=firefox.desktop
x-scheme-handler/https=firefox.desktop
Now I already took
Tor Browser, which seems to be
start-tor-browser.desktop when I look at it in the terminal via
ls -ll and essentially runs the command:
Code:
sh -c '"/opt/tor-browser_en-US/Browser/start-tor-browser --new-window" --detach || ([ ! -x "/opt/tor-browser_en-US/Browser/start-tor-browser" ] && "$(dirname "$*")"/Browser/start-tor-browser --detach)' dummy %k
and added it to
/usr/share/applications and to
~/.local/share/applications. So when I change the line of
~/.config/mimeapps.list file to this:
Code:
x-scheme-handler/http=start-tor-browser.desktop
x-scheme-handler/https=start-tor-browser.desktop
then it does use the Tor Browser to open my urls (eg. from a text document). But then the error appears:
Quote:
Tor Browser is already running, but is not responding. To open a new window, you must first close the existing Tor Browser process, or restart your system.
|
.
So I feel a bit lost and probably made quite a few rookie mistakes. As mentioned I lack a lot of understanding how the whole 'application install process, how to manage installed software, where to put them in the file system and how to include them to the system' works. I hope somebody could sprinkle a bit of knowledge over my fresh Linux mind and I appreciate if somebody even already read through the whole post here. Thanks a lot!
TLDR;
Main Question:
- How can I make Tor Browser (installed as a downloaded application + moved to
/opt and not via apt-get in
/bin) be accessible in the "known applications" for Linux. So that for example I can pick it from the dropdown menu in Preferred Applications?
- How can I open links from a text document then directly with the Tor Browser even if I already run an instance of Tor Browser and not get the error that Tor Browser is already running?
- How in general can I include downloaded applications which I put in
/opt better to the system, so that the system recognizes them as good as the applications installed eg. via
apt-get install?
References:
[1]
https://www.reddit.com/r/TOR/comment...y_gpg/eu7oxq1/
[2]
https://tech.michaelaltfield.net/201...-certificates/
[3]
https://gist.github.com/rjhansen/67a...5f#mitigations
[4]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filesy...archy_Standard