new torbutton 1.6.5.2 says Tor is down when accessing remote 'tor' relay daemon
Torbutton 1.6.5.2 as bundled with Linux TBB 3.5 sees Tor as down when configured with a remote 'tor' relay daemon and no control port access. FF works fine and this would not be a problem except that Torbutton seems to refuse to process cookies when in this state. Running previous Linux TBB 2.3.25-15 with Torbutton 1.5.2 and this problem is not apparent.
A guess is that the new Torbutton logic that takes over management of the 'tor' daemon from Vidalia is unhappy without the daemon running.
It should be possible to use a check-box, about:config setting or environment variable to enable Torbutton use with a remote system 'tor' daemon. For obvious reason this includes Torbutton accepting 'tor' as useable with no access to the 'tor' relay control port. In my case, an instance of Vidalia is run on a different system and the "new identity" function invoked from there at the same time "new identity" is invoked from Torbutton.
Configured this by issuing
export TOR_SKIP_LAUNCH=1
and running
start-tor-browser
Then manually configuring the SOCKS proxy address.
I did look through the about:config extensions.torbutton for a setting for this and didn't see anything that looks like it.