Privoxy is an extremely versatile and powerful non-caching web proxy. It’s often used in combination with Tor to anonymously surf the web.
The downside to privoxy’s versatility is that it can be very difficult and complex to configure. The Tor wiki however has a nice minimal privoxy configuration example. Assumed Tor listens as SOCKS-proxy on your local host at port 9050 (could be any other host or port, as well), a minimal privoxy configuration file (/etc/privoxy/config) could look like this:
# Generally, this file goes in /etc/privoxy/config # # Tor listens as a SOCKS4a proxy here: forward-socks4a / 127.0.0.1:9050 . confdir /etc/privoxy logdir /var/log/privoxy # actionsfile standard # Internal purpose, recommended actionsfile default.action # Main actions file actionsfile user.action # User customizations filterfile default.filter # Don't log interesting things, only startup messages, warnings and errors logfile logfile #jarfile jarfile #debug 0 # show each GET/POST/CONNECT request debug 4096 # Startup banner and warnings debug 8192 # Errors - *we highly recommended enabling this* user-manual /usr/share/doc/privoxy/user-manual listen-address 127.0.0.1:8118 toggle 1 enable-remote-toggle 0 enable-edit-actions 0 enable-remote-http-toggle 0 buffer-limit 4096
To check if Tor is up and running correctly, the Tor project offers a nice little GUI, called Vidalia.