Wizard's Kid-Safe Livecd
I saw a thread on the pclinuxos forum discussing this new livecd based on PCLinuxOS called Wizard's Kid-Safe Livecd and it sounded a bit interesting. It is a remaster of PCLinuxOS .93 MiniME made for kids of all ages. The re-Master has taken out many applications and added a few, stirred, let rise, and baked at 350 degrees to produce a wonderful distro containing games, educational programs and a nice safe web interface. So now there's an alternative to using the Disney Channel for a babysitter.
Booting the cd results in an autostart of X and an autolog-in of root into a slimmed down KDE 3.5.2 desktop. In addition to KDE 3.5.2, it comes with Xorg 6.9.0. He's added in several extra games as well as several K-games not originally found in KDE.
Upon login one is immediately greeted by the Kid-Safe Welcome! It is a html page with logos linking to sites of interest to children such as libraries, pbs, online books & games and children friendly search engines. It must have taken a while to dig up all those family friendly sites. There must be almost 2 dozen sites listed. The internet connection is enabled at boot by default so surfing the internet is possible, but content is filtered by Dansguardian and squid. It even filtered out much of the content on my site and my google webmail account. I think the settings are quite high, but can be adjusted through the /etc/squid/squid.conf and /etc/dansguardian/dansguardian.conf files.
The desktop is a customized KDE environment. The wallpaper is the kde provided Fulmine outlined by customized panels and launchers. The menu is quite striped down as well. In fact, the "K menu" itself is gone. Instead we have mini-menus or launchers placed on a panel and put at the top of the desktop. There seems to be as many launchers as there are game categories under the regular KDE menu. Fortunately the Run command box link was left in the right-click menu.
In those menus you'll find plenty of games and edutainment apps, but not much else. Kate, Kwrite, and Tuxpaint are included. The list of games is quite extensive, including some 3D. Besides the games that come with KDE, it has many other extra Kgames as well as many others. Some gaming applications include Frozen-Bubble, Racer NL, Tuxpuck, Foobillards, Bumprace, LBreakout2, Neverball and Neverputt, SuperTux, KBoggle, blinken, and many others. In the edutainment department you find Khangman, KLatin, Kletters, Tuxtype, KTouch, Childsplay, KAlgebra, KPercentage, KGeography, KBruch, Earth 3D and Kstars.
With Kid-Safe being built on PCLinuxOS, many of pclos' core features remain. The PCLinuxOS Control Center is present as well as Synaptic. However I was not able to locate the harddrive installer, so I'm not sure how much one would really need the control center or software manager. But if you are in the mind to remaster, mklivecd was still present.
As a livecd this is a wonderful idea for the parent (or grandparent, aunt, uncle, babysitter, etc.) who would like to introduce their young children to a computer or enhance their older children's experience with a little more peace of mind. I think all the included games and educational applications as well as the handy links could not only provide hours of fun, but some learning opportunities to boot. The hardware detection was good, as far as tested. Performance was very good here, but I have a pretty fast machine with plenty of ram. 512mb ram is recommended. The 3D games didn't play very well under Xorg drivers for my nvidia card. But otherwise, I liked it. The layout was logical enough and the look was pretty. I'm not sure I understand the philosophy of or reasons behind the guest account being removed and leaving only the root account, but Kid-Safe doesn't mount any other system at boot or have icons for them. I think this livecd could be a good way to let your kids loose on the computer without worrying they could mess up your beloved install. I know I'll be booting Kid-Safe next time my Little Princess comes to visit.
*Kid-Safe Homepage.
*Kid-Safe LiveCD v.0.21-beta Torrent.
*Download Mirror.
*Screenshots.
*Kid-Safe RPMList.
*The PCLinuxOS 0.93 MiniME.
UPDATE: See this Post.
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This kind of reminds me of...
This
PG liveDVD:
"I set out to achieve three goals:
1. Internationalize PCLOS (At least KDE, Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice and system menus) at least for the Dutch language in order
for the LiveCD to be used at school or by the parents of my kids schoolfriends at home.
2. Have a reliable content filtering system running that does not rely on browser proxy-settings and cannot be turned off for all non-root users.
3. Have a "kids-friendly" interface. (Desktop/icons etc.)
4. Guard the "out-of-the-box" experience Tex and team have worked so hard on. (I ended up installing the Mozilla-nl package into /usr/local and symlinked /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins into it)
5. Have an easy way for parents to a)check the DansGuardian logfiles and b)adjust the banned phrases lists. "
Also:
Link
Good to see someone came up with the same, pity he does not credit Texstar or the dev team anywhere on his site! Just a case of manners.
Mike
Known Issue with Kid-Safe 0.10 Beta
Be aware about an important Known Issue with 0.10 Beta
(also so you know it is not your machine + how to fix it)
Hope fully wizard will fix this by next issue, I have
already communicated with wizard about the issue
The Kid-Safe LiveCD Beta has been set up so when it
boots up it will use wizards local USA NTP-server
So it will likely change your Machine System Time.
This is relivant for those that have not setup a
NTP-server on their hard drive Operating System. I
had not and subsiquently I've turned on NTP at bootup
of my HDD o/s this aviods the problem (most newbies
will not have done this). For those that have not
this LiveCD will mostly likely change the time on
Computers. I think all wizard has to do in future
is not set up the Clock -> time date -> NTP. Then
the problem will go away for the LiveCD plus also
if he nows puts back Texstar's installer, the NTP
can be setup by end users.
He did not know about this issue for the Beta and
so will not enable NTP at boot for a future LiveCD
Kid-Safe LiveCD v.0.20-beta
Kid-Safe LiveCD v.0.20-beta is now available.
Download Info: http://bellsouthpwp2.net/w/i/wizard_rb/kid-safe
Torrent = http://linuxtracker.org/torrents-details.php?id=2045
Kid-Safe LiveCD v.0.21-beta
Kid-Safe LiveCD v.0.21-beta is ready.
http://bellsouthpwp2.net/w/i/wizard_rb/kid-safe
Current Release: Version 0.21-beta (05.23.2006)
MD5: e44bdcae2ec41697aafde354dd69cd79
Torrent: http://linuxtracker.org/torrents-details.php?id=2069
FileFront: Site still down...
Changes:
- Fixed bug in installer
- Installed latest updates from repository
- LBreakout2 is in the penalty box for bad language
Kid-Safe LiveCD v.0.21-beta
the FileFront Site is back on line for direct
downloads of Kid-Safe LiveCD v.0.21-beta.iso
See: http://hosted.filefront.com/wizardrb
md5sum e44bdcae2ec41697aafde354dd69cd79 kid-safe-0.21-beta.iso
Discontinued project
FYI - Kid-Safe has become a Discontinued project
Refer to the Old Project Page at SourceForge for more information http://sourceforge.net/projects/kid-safe
Notice the:
As of 2006-12-02 18:28, this project is no longer under active development.
All other Links listed above are now broken (excluding local ones of Tuxmachines) as well as those links in other peoples comments.
NOTE:
I believer you will find that the "Download Wizard's Kid-Safe LiveCD"
at sourceforge above, now ONLY has the files to Build Your Own on top of a PCLinuxOS 0.93a MiniME installation