installing tor and general comments

I'd found that I couldn't make the latest version of tor - configure was not recognizing the libevent which I'd installed.

Yesterday I was talking to KR about open source and mindsets and spouted my views on it, then thought I'd be somewhat two-faced if I did not give equal coverage of the problems with open source and Linux. And basically the problem is that you have to take time to get quite a bit of stuff working.

So, in this case, the installation doc on the website did not help much, but the INSTALL file in the tar.gz download suggested

./configure --with-libevent-dir=/usr/local

and hey presto, it works!

While using tor too, one needs to do some manual tweaking - the timeout interval seems too long or something like that, and sometimes the speed drops dramatically. Ctrl-c to stop tor and starting it again makes it faster again.