Unix and Linux → Help choosing child friendly web surfing for ubuntu platform

I have three OS set-ups and have chosen the ubuntu 9.04 to dedicated to my son. I want something configurable to allow a 7 year old to surf to the net with secured browser (safer).
ash
All tips welcome.

just set up a limited user account, use firefox with some safe browsing addons, google firefox addons, there are a ton of them.

I don't know what Edubuntu has to offer...

»edubuntu.org/

or

»www.linuxjournal.com/art ··· cle/8288

»www.qimo4kids.com/page/FAQ.aspx

There is another one out there that I have used before when testing. A friend asked about having a safe desktop once for their kids. I know there are also some Firefox extensions for kid too.

Geek

My opinion is that you should be more worried about content and less worried about your GNU/Linux system being compromised. A limited-user account (who runs X as root?) should be just fine, ensure he doesn't have the root password and is not a member of /etc/sudoers.

I'd really look at turning up Squid and using a strict ACL to only permit his access to certain sites. There is a sea of inappropriate content for a 7 year old out there that's very easily to either intentionally or inadvertently stumble upon, regardless of your parenting efforts. Tighten up evasion techniques by using a transparent iptables redirect and Squid in transparent mode.

Things like SquidGuard and Dans Guardian are all fine and dandy but I find that these blacklist models don't work well. A simple "You're allowed to go here; Disney, Nickelodeon, PBS-Kids, etc" works far better in practice and conceptually than loading known-bad destinations and hoping the coverage is wide enough to avoid one slipping through.

Commercial products suffer the same fate; evasion and lack of coverage results in exposure. This is always a limitation with blacklist style solutions.

Along with the content filtering (Dans Guardian etc...), I'm throwing in OpenDNS as another layer. If you can configure the other items listed in the other posts, OpenDNS should be trivial for your router/firewall or whatever gateway you're using.

Edit:

For GNOME, to lock down the desktop, Pessulus is great (in the Ubuntu repos) KDE also has a "Kiosk" mode I think. OpenBox is also easy to configure.