Gsoc Idea: Lunux Tor/Firefox Bundle

[phobos at rootme.org]

On Wed, Mar 25, 2009 at 11:33:46AM -0600, cplusplus328 at gmail.com wrote 1.5K bytes in 33 lines about:
: I am interested in taking up the challange of creating the Tor/Firefox
: bundle for Linux. I am knowledgeable in C++, with some familiarity in C and
: Bash scripting, and I am most familiar with Ubuntu Linux. I am not well

Great, we welcome your interest.  You probably want to
familiarize yourself with how the bundle for Windows is created,
https://svn.torproject.org/svn/torbrowser/.   Perhaps getting TBB
working on any one linux is 80% of the effort to getting it to work on
all linuxes.

You might find Section 7.2 of the three-year roadmap,
https://www.torproject.org/press/presskit/2008-12-19-roadmap-full.pdf,
has some more ideas.

There are some common questions to tackle as part of creating a
TBB for linux:

- Is it safe to link tor, vidlia, pidgin, or polipo to dynamic libraries
  on the OS?  Is it safe to assume that some of these libraries are
  available on all target linuxes (such as openssl, qt4, libz, libevent,
  etc)?

- Can one compile tor, vidalia, pidgin, and polipo without linking to dynamic
  libraries?

- Are there functions that if Vidalia could do, would make running all
  of this easier?  For instance, should vidalia control polipo
stop/start much like it can control Tor now?

- What traces are left behind after running TBB on linux?  We have
  completed some analysis of this for Windows,
https://svn.torproject.org/svn/torbrowser/trunk/docs/traces.txt.  The
next step is to not only document the traces, if any, but suggest or
code fixes for leaving no trace behind.

Feel free to join us at irc://irc.oftc.net/tor.  I look forward to your
application.

-- 
Andrew