Vidalia states that TOR is not running

Asked by coljohnhannibalsmith

I'm using TOR, Privoxy and Vidalia and Vidalia states that TOR is not running.

I know that TOR is running, because when I go to https:/check.torproject.org I get the following message:

"Congratulations you are using TOR."

I get the following error message from Vidalia:

"TOR exited"

"Vidalia detected that TOR exited unexpectedly."

"Please check the message log for indicators about what happened to TOR before it exited."

Below is the output of the message log:

Dec 23 12:31:26.116 [Notice] Tor v0.2.1.20. This is experimental software. Do not rely on it for strong anonymity. (Running on Linux x86_64)
Dec 23 12:31:26.117 [Notice] Initialized libevent version 1.3e using method epoll. Good.
Dec 23 12:31:26.117 [Notice] Opening Socks listener on 127.0.0.1:9050
Dec 23 12:31:26.117 [Warning] Could not bind to 127.0.0.1:9050: Address already in use. Is Tor already running?
Dec 23 12:31:26.118 [Warning] Failed to parse/validate config: Failed to bind one of the listener ports.
Dec 23 12:31:26.118 [Error] Reading config failed--see warnings above.

TOR is already running, bit I've never had this problem before. I've never used Vidalia to start TOR. Vidalia just showed me the bandwidth usage and the network, which it doesn't seem to want to do now.

Anybody got ant theorys?

Thanks, John

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eyehatesleep
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Soul-Sing (soulzing) said :
#1

do you use privoxy?

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Best eyehatesleep (eyehatesleep) said :
#2

Had the same problem recently, and see that this hasn't been answered.

It seems as if, as you had Tor installed before using Vidalia, that your Tor was likely configured to run from computer start-up. It further seems that Vidalia needs to start Tor itself. So, all you have to do is turn off Tor to use Vidalia. At a command prompt, type in sudo /etc/init.d/tor stop

Then run Vidalia, and it should work just fine.

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coljohnhannibalsmith (johnw54321) said :
#3

Thanks eyehatesleep, that solved my question.

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Michal Grňo (michal-grno) said :
#4

It doesn't work for me :(
Tor isn't running but I still get the error.
Can you help me?

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yoosofan (yoosofan) said :
#5

If you install both tor and Vidalia in your system. Running the following command in your terminal will solve your problem.

$ sudo killall tor

from http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-software-2/ubuntu-tor-exited-why-not-fixed-in-vidalia-package-891186/

If you like tor does not run automatically run the following command

$ sudo gedit /etc/default/tor

and change the "yes" to "no" in the follwing section of this file

RUN_DAEMON="yes"

from(by some changes) http://askubuntu.com/questions/36000/cannot-start-tor-with-vidalia-failed-to-bind-listening-port-because-of-tor-sock