Dependencies: You're going to need Privoxy (www.privoxy.org) installed, and configured to point at a socks4a proxy -- see below. For tor itself, you're going to need openssl (0.9.5 or later) and popt (1.6 or later). If you're on Linux, everything will probably work fine. OS X and BSD (but see below under troubleshooting) now work too. Let us know if you get it working elsewhere. If you got the source from cvs: Run "./autogen.sh", which will run the various auto* programs and then run ./configure for you. From there, you should be able to run 'make' and you'll be on your way. If you got the source from a tarball: Run ./configure and make as usual. There isn't much point in 'make install' yet. If this doesn't work for you / troubleshooting: If you couldn't find popt (eg you're on BSD), try CPPFLAGS="-I/usr/local/include" LDFLAGS="-L/usr/local/lib" \ ./configure rather than simply ./configure. And install popt if you don't have it. Check out the list archives at http://archives.seul.org/or/dev/ and see if somebody else has reported your problem. If not, please subscribe and let us know what you did to fix it, or give us the details and we'll see what we can do. Once you've got it compiled: If you want to run a local onion proxy (that is, you're a user, not a node operator), go into src/config and look at the oprc file. You can run an onion proxy by "../or/or -f oprc". See below for how to use it. If you want to set up your own test network (that is, act like you're a full set of node operators), go into src/config/ and look at the routers.or file. Also in that directory are public and private keys for various nodes (*-public, *-private) and configuration files for the nodes (*-orrc). You can generate your own keypairs with the orkeygen program, or use the provided ones for testing. Once you've got your config files ready, you're ready to start up your network. I recommend using a screen session (man screen), or some other way to handle many windows at once. I open a window for each onion router, go into the src/config directory, and run something like "../or/or -f moria2-orrc". How to use it: Download privoxy (www.privoxy.org). Install it. Add the following line to your 'config' file: forward-socks4a / localhost:9050 . Don't forget the . at the end. From here, you can point your browser/etc at localhost:8118 and your traffic will go through Privoxy, then through the onion proxy, to the onion routing network. For more convenient command-line use, I recommend making a ~/.wgetrc with the line http_proxy=localhost:8118 Then you can do things like "wget seul.org" and watch as it downloads from the onion routing network. For fun, you can wget a very large file (a megabyte or more), and then ^z the wget a little bit in. The onion routers will continue talking for a while, queueing around 500k in the kernel-level buffers. When the kernel buffers are full, and the outbuf for the AP connection also fills, the internal congestion control will kick in and the exit connection will stop reading from the webserver. The circuit will wait until you fg the wget -- and other circuits will work just fine throughout. Then try ^z'ing the onion routers, and watch how well it recovers. Then try ^z'ing several of them at once. :)