Since Friday's updates I haven't been able to launch Tor with Vidalia. I've rebuilt both, but no luck.

From searching around the Internet it would appear that one or more of the updates have broken Vidalia's ability to connect to Tor through port 9051.

Any ideas as to a solution would be greatly appreciated.

No one answered yet, doubt this is much help, Vidalia development was stopped but I noticed something called Arm Monitor I wonder if that can do the same thing.

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One suggestion was to uninstall and reinstall vidalia, so I removed both vidalia and tor, deleted all references to the same in /etc and the user home directory, reboot and reinstalled. No joy. The problem remains.

It is not the firewall.

Next.........

So far I've rebuilt Tor, Vidalia, GeoIP, libevent (and updated), openssl and mozilla-nss,
but no joy, Vidalia still cannot talk to Tor.

Tor is broken for me too on Slackware64-current. Here is what I get when I start Tor:

It never ends. Tor just doesn't start.

EDIT: I did notice that my Cooling fan starts spinning really fast and tor starts using 100 CPU until I Ctrl+C this script.

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Arm is for running a relay/bridge and to monitor the traffic. At least that is what I remember seeing when I researched Vidalia alternatives some months ago. Besides, Vidalia works as advertised and I believe SBo's version is newer than what is shipped with the Tails live cd. Tails ships what Debian squeeze provides, v 0.2.10.

I've been forced to use the Tor browser bundle. I have been dead in the water with Proxychains + Privoxy + Tor though since Tor stopped runing in -current.

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Ah, well, at least you are getting some feedback.
On this box, Vidalia pops up the error message and says to check the log, but the log is blank and the "advanced messages" (which I think is the same thing they are calling a "log") is also blank.
Tried from a terminal and ditto, no feedback.
Tor works. The problem is Vidalia isn't talking to Tor and, therefore, can't start it.

BTW, the people over at PC-BSD (FreeBSD with pre-configured desktops) have, with version 10.2, made Tor available system wide. Once you have fired up Tor, everything you do is routed through Tor, regardless of what browser, mail client, etc., you are using. How safe that is, I really don't know. Each time you elect to route through Tor a notice pops up advising the user to learn how to use Tor properly and displays the link to the Tor website.
Just FYI.

So Tor is starting for you? It isn't starting up for me and Vidalia doesn't connect to Tor either.

I use a custom built Tails based live CD when I use Tor. It includes "other software" that many would deem unethical. Sometimes I like to use Tor to browse the web or wget something with the assistance of proxychains/privoxy on my Slackware install for a small layer of anonymity. I never use tor with identifying accounts, like my personal email or chat accounts. I also never use tor from home.

Tor is not really meant for day to day use unless you are ALWAYS trying to be anonymous. It is surprising to see that PC-BSD is distributing the whole OS with Tor as a default service. I guess the devs assume all PC-BSD users know best anonymity practices and how to implement them.

Anyway, I reported in the "Should be fixed in SBo" thread that Tor is not working. Maybe someone will know whats going on.

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Tor works on this box with Slackware64 -current (as of the moment) when fired up using the Tor Browser.

The problem, as it appears here, and I may be wrong, is Vidalia can't find Tor so it can't start it, i.e., something is blocking Vidalia from communicating with Tor.

BTW, I was very impressed with the TAILS Live CD. Everything you need, including the ability to burn a CD/DVD.

I will have to reinstall everything I think. I'm guessing one of the dependencies is borked somehow. I even tried the alpha release of Tor.

I usually don't use Vidalia in Slackware. I have other ways of probing the Tor network and use Tortunnel to cherry pick a single hop or just use proxychains to randmonize/increase the hops on the Tor network.

Yes, I it makes me want to create a Slackware Tails live cd, but have been very busy with other things.

I finally got some extra time to troubleshoot this. What I did to fix it was reinstall everything. I also grabbed tor, vidalia and GeoIP from the SlackOnly repository since those were likely already recompiled against the latest -current correctly. Like I said earlier, I usually do not use Vidalia, but I decided to install it and start using it. It was just a matter of adding the right configurations to /etc/tor/torrc and ~/.vidalia/vidalia.conf. My setup lets me use tor + vidalia + privoxy + proxychains as a normal user.

You need to have tor run with an active control port for Vidalia to make use of the running Tor service.

You should run Vidalia once and then exit it right away so that the configuration file is generated. Then add the quoted portion listed below to the top of vidalia.conf. It will allow Vidalia to make use of the GeoIP.dat file installed with GeoIP.

For more information read /usr/doc/vidalia-0.2.21/README.SBo.

If you want I can post the configurations for privoxy and proxychains too. I am short on time and have somewhere to be; will be back on later.

You will need to also generate a tor Control Port hash for extra security. Put the resulting hash where it says "<TOR_GENERATED_HASH_HERE>" in torrc.

Install/Reinstall:
/etc/tor/torrc:
EDIT: Updated torrc with a few options that add safety. Changes in red text.
~/.vidalia/vidalia.conf
Everything seems to be working. I will post back if something goes amiss.

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Thank you very much!
I just did a fresh install and nothing changed, that is, the problem with Vidalia remains, so I'll give the above a go.
Thanks, again.

Well, I tried editing the various files, but nothing worked.
So, finally, remembering you mentioned downloading fresh copies, I went to link you provided, downloaded the same three files and installed them.

Problem solved.

Wish I could say how, but really don't know. I did notice that the packages from SlackOnly were as much as a 100K smaller than the packages compiled using the SBo scripts.

BTW, who is behind SlackOnly?

Thanks, again!

Edit in: I was just reading solarfiels thread about SlackOnly and it seems a gentleman by the name of, Panagiotis Nikolaou is the
creator of the site.
Hats off to Mr. Nikolaou!

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BTW, before downloading the package from SlackOnly, I tried running Tor by starting the rc.tor file from the command line and received the same error you posted above in message #6,
and as you experienced, one core ran at 100 percent until I killed the process. So.... that means, I would think, that Tor was the problem, not Vidalia.