Vidalia detected that the tor software exited unexpectedly

If you are reading this, its because you have installed Tor and Vidalia in Ubuntu (or Debian) and found out that they do not play nice together.

You probably got an error:

Vidalia detected that the tor software exited unexpectedly.
Please check the message log for recent warning or error messages.

Error Message - Vidalia detected that the tor software exited unexpectedly

And you're probably wondering how to quickly fix this problem to get browse the Internet anonymously. A temporary solution is to type the following command in the terminal:

sudo killall tor

Restart Vidalia and it should work with tor like a charm. But the real problem is that every time you want to use tor with Vidalia, you will need to input that command in the terminal...

The Problem with tor and Vidalia

Upon installation, tor will automatically start-up when booting Ubuntu. When you open Vidalia, it will first check if there is an existing tor process and try to connect to the control port of tor. All we need to do is reconfigure tor so it allows Vidalia to connect and start using the tor process.

How to solve and fix error message: Vidalia detected that the tor software exited unexpectedly. Please check the message log for recent warning or error messages.

First step: is to open the configuration file of tor. Open a terminal and input this command:

sudo gedit /etc/tor/torrc

After the file opens, scroll down to line 53 to line 60 and you will see something like this:

## The port on which Tor will listen for local connections from Tor ## controller applications, as documented in control-spec.txt. #ControlPort 9051 ## If you enable the controlport, be sure to enable one of these ## authentication methods, to prevent attackers from accessing it. #HashedControlPassword 16:872860B76453A77D60CA2BB8C1A7042072093276A3D701AD684053EC4C #CookieAuthentication 1

Second Step: Remove # from #ControlPort 9051 so line 55 looks like this:

ControlPort 9051

Then enable password authentication by removing # from #HashedControlPassword so line 58 looks like this:

HashedControlPassword

Third Step: Input the following command into the terminal to create a password for tor, but where it says, “mypassword,” replace that with a password of your choosing:

tor --hash-password mypassword

The terminal will respond with a hash that looks like this:

16:816172DEB125A9CA603A6A8A5C16D0642DA4556E4EC417E6B9AAC9AF0D

Copy this entire hash string, and then replace the defauld value on line 58.

This is how our torrec file looked like when we finished configuring it:

## The port on which Tor will listen for local connections from Tor ## controller applications, as documented in control-spec.txt. ControlPort 9051 ## If you enable the controlport, be sure to enable one of these ## authentication methods, to prevent attackers from accessing it. #HashedControlPassword 16:816172DEB125A9CA603A6A8A5C16D0642DA4556E4EC417E6B9AAC9AF0D #CookieAuthentication 1

Fourth Step: Save the torrc file: ctrl + s and close it. Then restart tor by inputing this to a terminal:

sudo /etc/init.d/tor restart

That's it! Open Vidalia and it should now be able to start and stop tor without a problem.

Note: If Vidalia gives you an error with failing to authenticate with tor, just exit vidalia and re-open it.