Installing tor and vidalia

Vidalia runs on most platforms supported by Qt 4.1 or later, including Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux or other Unix variants using the X11 window system.
Prepare your system
sudo apt-get install libevent
Now you need to get the latest tor source code from here
wget http://www.torproject.org/dist/tor-0.2.0.22-rc.tar.gz
tar zxvf tor-0.2.0.22-rc.tar.gz
cd tor-0.2.0.22-rc
./configure
make
sudo make install
Install Vidalia GUI
You need to edit the /etc/apt/sources.list file
sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list
add the following lines
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/adnarim/ubuntu gutsy main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/adnarim/ubuntu gutsy main
Save and exit the file
Update the source list
sudo apt-get update
Install vidalia
sudo apt-get install vidalia
Once installed press alt F2 and open the run prompt and type in “vidalia” without the quotes, this will start tor, vidalia and you can configure tor/vidalia by right clicking on the tray applet and click on settings, right there you can view all the nodes and choose what to connect to, see node uptimes, os’s and locations with a graphical map.
For web browsing in firefox I prefer using an extention named FoxyProxy it works well with firefox and swiftfox, you can grab this extention directly from here
If you prefer stronger anonymity & protection I strongly Suggest Torbutton for firefox you can download from here
Install the addon and go through the Tor wizard and it will set you up for you and you can view which tor nodes you connect through actively via vidalia
Speed Tweaks for tor
Lets get to editing our torrc so we can improve the speed!
gedit ~/.vidalia/torrc
Paste this at the beginning of the torrc:
# Set the Tor Circuit Build time to find faster tor servers, increments of seconds
CircuitBuildTimeout 2
# connections while Tor is not in use.
KeepalivePeriod 60
# Force Tor to consider whether to build a new circuit every NUM seconds.
NewCircuitPeriod 15
# Set How many entry guards we should we keep at a time
NumEntryGuards 8