[BBLISA] Linux for my 1 year old: skip the login screen?

[David Allan]

This is a problem that I'm going to face shortly, so I'm responding even 
though I don't have a very concrete idea of what wil work.  I'd be 
interested in hearing what people think of the following ideas.

IIRC, gdm can be configured to autologin a particular user, although I 
haven't tried it.

Re: whitelisting, since I assume you don't have to worry [yet] about 
active attacks against the whitelisting mechanism, I would just use 
iptables on the box itself.  Obviously, specifying hostnames resolved by 
DNS is a bad idea where security is needed, but should work ok for what 
you want.  I'm just not sure what will happen if there are multiple 
addresses for a particular name.

At least in Gnome, turning off the menubars and icons on the desktop 
shouldn't be that much work.  I'm not a fan of too much junk on my 
desktop, so I often turn off a bunch of the menubars.  Right clicking on 
them should give you an option 'Delete this panel'

Dave


On Sun, 30 Mar 2008, Alex wrote:

> Hi folks. So I have a 4 year old and a 1 year old. The older one won a 
> computer as a prize for potty training. I am disappointed in what is out 
> there as an interface for kids - things like
>
> http://www.linux.com/feature/27651
>
> http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-jr/
>
> So I will try to set something up myself. What I want is a screen with 
> absolutely nothing on it except some icons that will launch either 
> software or a browser to a web site (eg starfall.com, pbskids.org,...). 
> twm maybe? I shall have to bruch off my X expertise. Any suggestions for 
> how to do this easily?
>
> It should also boot directly to that screen, bypassing the xdm login. Is 
> there a simple way to automatically log in a specified user?
>
> It would be good if firefox (or some other browser) could easily be 
> configured with a whitelist of domains allowed to browse to; clicking on 
> a link to go elsewhere would just not work. I have looked at a few 
> parental control systems. Glubble (a firefox plugin) you had to log in 
> to, which is a non-starter for this purpose. Also, I would prefer a web 
> browser that hides the top bar and the menus and so forth - so you can 
> do nothing but use the web page.
>
> Conceptually, I suppose one could take a standard GNOME or KDE setup and 
> remove functionality until you get what you want, but it seems simpler 
> to start from nothing and build up instead. I'm just surprised that no 
> one has done this already.
>
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