computing for kids
Overview
Computers intended for use by children have a specialized set of needs.
|
This page is a seed article. You can help HTYP water it: make a request to expand a given page and/or donate to help give us more writing-hours!
|
Related Articles
Notes
Linux for kids
Linux offers a lot more fine-tuned control of how computers are set up, including who is allowed access and what they are allowed access to. There is even a particular distribution of Ubuntu aimed at kids – Edubuntu – but it is designed more for group-educational contexts than for home use. (For example, it assigns fixed IP addresses by default rather than using DHCP.)
Handy remote-control commands:
- sudo shutdown now
- forces the computer to shutdown immediately, terminating all activity (especially useful at bedtime)
- telinit 3 ; telinit 5
- not sure of the details, but this should end the current GUI session without shutting down (n.b. phealy says telinit 5 won't work on Ubuntu, so just telinit 3 should suffice)
- ps -u username
- shows what processes the user is currently running; you can kill any inappropriate games
- last
- Shows logins and other system events for the current month, with timestamps and durations; see 2006-10-15 sample output from 'last' command
- last -f /var/log/wtmp.1 shows last month's log
- lastlog shows a list of everyone who has ever logged in, the date/time of when they last did so, and for how long they were logged in.
To be able to view what kids are seeing remotely (incomplete instructions):
- on the kid's machine:
- edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf
- inside Section "Module", add Load "vnc"
- inside Section "Screen", add Option "PasswordFile" "/root/.vnc/passwd"
- save the changes
- as root, run vncpasswd
- edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf
- not sure what happens next; does something need restarting? Presumably you also need to run a VNC client on your machine, and that will need parameters...