Running Tor on Kali as root

Hello my fellow greenhorns !

Even though my content is mostly about networking and written in romanian, i’ve decided that my article today will be in english because i will document a fix to an issue that gave me a bit of trouble and i found little help out there. Recently i’ve installed the latest distro of Kali Linux on a VM and had an unpleasant surprise when Tor Browser refused to launch because i was logged in as root.

The fix is as follows:

After you download and extract the Tor files, you’ll have to look into the extracted folder, then in Browser and search for the file named start-tor-browser. I extracted my Tor folder on the Desktop and renamed it Tor.

We will have to edit this file using a text editor. I used nano for simplicity reasons.

Use the command nano start-tor-browser to launch the editor. Now press CTRL+W, and search for “id -u”, then edit the file by pressing SHIFT+I so that the file will look like the one below:

Before


After

After you finished, press CTRL+X and agree to the changes made.

In the end, for the whole thing to work, we’ll need to change the ownership of the Tor folder.

For that we will use the command : root@kali:~/Desktop# chown -hR root Tor

This is it ! Now you can run Tor, either from GUI or from Terminal using the command :

root@kali:~/Desktop/Tor# ./start-tor-browser.desktop

Sorry for the bad english. I hope you found this useful.

Happy surfing ! :)