Note that tor will automatically run on each startup, so you'll have to kill it on each and every startup if you want to connect to tor using vidalia. Set your browser to use SOCKS proxy (v5 works, haven't tested it for v4), ip address:127.0.0.1 and port:9050 when you want to use tor otherwise do not disturb this. Then ask vidalia to connect you to the tor network and hopefully it will work. Sudo killall tor so that vidalia can launch tor as its child If you want to operate, customize and/or switch on/off tor easily without the cryptic CLI then you might want to use vidalia. Since tor is already running, use sudo ps -ax |grep tor to confirm, all you need is to configure your browser to route traffic through tor which i suppose you haven't. The message you are getting when you switch on vidalia and consequently when vidalia tries to connect you to the tor network is because tor is set run on startup, meaning when you start vidalia there is already an instance of tor running on your OS and therefore it can't start another(maybe tor is programmed to one instance per session). I had the very same problem and here's the solution which was helpful to me:

Tor check failed though Vidalia shows green onion

AFAIK pidgin, xchat, thunderbird support socks5 proxy. Similary choose one for firefox if you use firefox. Optionally, install any browser proxy switch addons, I use chromium with proxyswitchy. Use socks proxy where supported just change port to 9050 and type to socks5. If you want to connect everything through tor you need to set system proxy with System Settings > Network > Network ProxyĪnd then setup proxy to 127.0.0.1 and port to 8118. Most of the tor users recommend using the default socks proxy if the application handles it. You can use privoxy in place of polipo as well. I am giving much focus here on polipo because tor itself recommends polipo and is installed by default on tor installation. Tor needs to start before polipo, or else polipo will occupy the 9050 port and tor will start with errors Sudo service tor start & sudo service polipo start Sudo service tor stop & sudo service polipo stop You can use this configuration for polipo to use with tor.

Tor doesnot use 8118 as its port it uses 9050 and it is a socks proxy. What you need to configure is polipo/privoxy for tor as your are using http proxy. Install tor which will install polipo as a recommended package.

How to start tor vpn services