Forum Thread: How to Install Tor as a Root in Kali Linux

Introduction to Tor

Tor is a browser just like google, Firefox and any other browser except it keeps you anonymous by hiding your IP address. Tor can be used to access the the dark web, where it is known for the use of illegal activities due to its anonymity.

How Tor works

The Tor software protects you by bouncing your communications around a distributed network of relays run by volunteers all around the world: it prevents somebody watching your Internet connection from learning what sites you visit, it prevents the sites you visit from learning your physical location, and it lets you access sites which are blocked.

Installing tor ( As a root )

To install tor, first open a terminal and type the command: "apt-get install tor" and keep the tab opened.

Go to your browser ( The default browser for kali Linux is Firefox ) and go to the website: https://www.torproject.org/dist/torbrowser/7.0.2/tor-browser-linux64-7.0.2_en-US.tar.xzand You can see that there are two download buttons that says 64 bit or 32 bit. You can choose 32 bit if your computer is only compatible to 32 bit but I personally think that most computers can handle 64 bit. After you have downloaded tor, go to your downloads folder and open a terminal from there. To open a terminal, simply right click once and select "open in terminal". Once you've open a terminal from the downloads folder, you should see: "root@kali:~/Downloads#" in the terminal. In the terminal you have opened, type "tor" and it should start installing tor. Now, leave that tab opened and go to your downloads folder. In this folder, you should see the tor file that you downloaded. What you need to do from here is to unzip the folder in order for your computer to be able to access the file. You can unzip this by right clicking on the zipped tor file and selecting "Extract here". After that, you should have the tor folder unzipped in your downloads folder next to the zipped file. Now, copy the full name of your unzipped tor folder and open a new terminal and type : "chown -R root:root <name of the unzipped tor folder you just copied>". We are finally done with typing commands in terminals from this point. Go back to your downloads folder and double click on your unzipped tor folder. You should see two files from there, one that says Browser and one that says Tor browser. Double click on your Browser folder because we need to adjust something from there in order to run tor as a root. You should see a bunch of files in there. Look for the file that says "start-tor-browser". After you have found the file, double click on it and you should see a bunch of texts in there. Press ctrl + F and there should be a search bar on the top right of the corner. Type "root" in the search bar and it should take you to a text highlighting the word "root". if you are wondering which text it is, it should show :

if "`id -u`" -eq 0 ; then
complain "The Tor Browser Bundle should not be run as root. Exiting."
exit 1
fi

Now, put a hashtag in front of the 4 lines and the results should look like this :

#if "`id -u`" -eq 0 ; then
# complain "The Tor Browser Bundle should not be run as root. Exiting."
# exit 1
#fi

Now, click save and your done!

To open the tor browser, double click on the "Tor browser setup" file located in the same folder as the "start-tor-browser" text file that you just edited. If I'm not mistaken it should be in the same row as the text file.

Thanks for reading this article and hope everything works out for you :)