Why are Tor Browser's tor and standalone tor isolated?

Question

I have Tor Browser Bundle 6.0.7 installed on linux and I also installed stand-alone tor through yum. I run standalone tor in a shell while TBB is running but any shell traffic (e.g. wget) redirected to torsocks doesn't go to TBB's tor, but to standalone tor (i.e. the traffic dosen't mix), meaning torsocks wget won't work even if TBB is running, without standalone tor. My process list is as follows (I simplified it):

    gnome-terminal-server
      bash
        sudo
          tor
      bash
        wget <-- with torsocks

    ...

    firefox
      tor

Why can't I redirect all traffic to one tor?

Answer 1

Tor Browser ships it's own copy with tor because it's intended to work without the user having to install any extra packages on a standard desktop environment. As such it comes with it's own copy of Tor which is launched by Tor Browser.

You can use torsocks through Tor Browser's tor or Tor Browser through the tor system daemon, it just requires configuration.

torsocks can be configured through torsocks.conf, from the torsocks.conf(5) manual page that explains how to configure torsocks.conf which is mentioned on the torsocks(1) manual page that explains how to use torsocks:

CONFIGURATION
SYNTAX
   The basic structure of all lines in the configuration file is:

          <directive> <parameters>

   Empty  lines  are ignored and all input on a line after a '#' character
   is ignored.

DIRECTIVES
   The following directives are used in the torsocks configuration file:
...
   TorPort port
          The port on  which  the  Tor  SOCKS  server  receives  requests.
          (default: 9050)

Tor Browser's Tor runs by default on port 9150, to avoid conflicting with the default system tor daemon port of 9050, by reading the manual and configuring it you can infact just use one tor