On Tue, Feb 01, 2000 at 07:20:28PM +0000, Ben Armstrong wrote: > 1) Kidproofing > - If there's a way to break your system, your kid will find it > very, very quickly. For example, it would be a good idea to use > quotas and ulimits liberally. Also, you might want to restrict > access to some tools & functions of programs that adult users take > for granted. e.g. I went thru a frustrating phase when my daughter > learned the 'passwd' command, as daily she would change her password > to something arbitrary and promptly forget it the next day ;) Oh, and > then there was the time that she insisted on using the file-browser > in pico to include every file imaginable into her buffer, including > mp3's, tarballs, the kernel and (eep) /dev/dsp, which she had > read access to so she could play games with sound ... I'd just figure those as ``well, now you know not to do that in future'' lessons, personally. I mean, as long as she can't crash the system (which is a critical bug anyway whether she's a kid or not) or similar, and as long as it doesn't take too long for you to fix whatever's gone wrong (alt-f8, root, password, passwd foo, bar, exit, isn't *that* much trouble, eg) then I wouldn't be too worried, personally. YMMV, of course. And I don't have kids, neither. You might like to have a backup program to copy your kids home directories into somewhere safe in case they discover rm. Some would say that rm'ing your homedirectory is a good lesson. Which it is. Watching daddy make backups is probably helpful to get rid of that nasty `but real men don't need backups' attitude... :) > 2) desktop > - Some window managers & settings for window managers make it > easier for a kid to get around, whereas others are frustrating. > Although it might be argued that adults would benefit from the > same fine-tunings, I think it would be useful to provide variants > of configurations with kids specifically in mind. I wonder if you could do that with an <foo>wm theme. Big buttons, a toolbar of some sort, and the obligatory bright colours? > 4) parental guidance > - although we might squirm at the thought, "net nannies" and the > like are going to be a concern of some parents; provide the > tools and let *them* make the choice Hey, net nanny software's great. Banning http://*.doubleclick.net/* makes the web so much more pleasant. > 5) "kids' box" > - kids might have their own Linux box. What's the best way to > set up a kids' box and integrate it into your home network? Remember to make sure you've converted yourself to ssh, scp, https, and so on *before* they discover tcpdump... :) > I very much want to see my kids grow up using Linux because the > alternative is so odious to me. Windows doesn't even come with QBasic anymore, does it? An OS without a programming language. *shudder* > Whether I like it or not, Windows is far > more geared towards kids than Linux is. That's very quotable. Cheers, aj -- Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/> I don't speak for anyone save myself. GPG encrypted mail preferred. ``The thing is: trying to be too generic is EVIL. It's stupid, it results in slower code, and it results in more bugs.'' -- Linus Torvalds
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