SlackwareThis Forum is for the discussion of Slackware Linux.
Notices
Welcome to LinuxQuestions.org, a friendly and active Linux Community.
You are currently viewing LQ as a guest. By joining our community you will have the ability to post topics, receive our newsletter, use the advanced search, subscribe to threads and access many other special features. Registration is quick, simple and absolutely free. Join our community today!
Note that registered members see fewer ads, and ContentLink is completely disabled once you log in.
If you have any problems with the registration process or your account login, please contact us. If you need to reset your password, click here.
Having a problem logging in? Please visit this page to clear all LQ-related cookies.
Get a virtual cloud desktop with the Linux distro that you want in less than five minutes with Shells! With over 10 pre-installed distros to choose from, the worry-free installation life is here! Whether you are a digital nomad or just looking for flexibility, Shells can put your Linux machine on the device that you want to use.
Exclusive for LQ members, get up to 45% off per month. Click here for more info.
When their experience and knowledge increase they will begin to understand the beauty of Slackware... it is to be hoped. !
I love it...
Probably - that's what happened with me, haha.
I started on Fedora in a dual boot with winXP, and early on tried Slackware 12.something and it didn't work out too well - I installed it over my old Windows partition, but I didn't know the command line well enough to get it running properly and "startx" didn't work properly the first time I typed it, and I didn't know how to configure lilo and locked myself out of my Fedora partition. So, I reinstalled Fedora over it, and used my spare partition to try out different distros, because Fedora was getting annoying (stability issues almost every time I updated, some things broke, some things never worked etc.)
after distro hopping a bit, I decided to give slackware another try, since I had gotten much better with the linux CLI and understood it better... and now, I have slackware installed on all my machines.
Back at the point:
Are there any other suggestions for porn-filtering?
I haven't gotten to try out Dansguardian yet, but just in case it doesn't work out well I'd appreciate any other suggestions the forum comes up with.
also - are there any decent plugins/addons for firefox to help block them? - they aren't really tech-savy so I don't think the ease-of-removal would be an issue, and it might be a simpler solution. (or, at the very least, a nice way to teach them how customizable firefox can be)
I started with Linux because a fellow gave me two IBM PC 300s, so I had extra computers to play with.
I set up one for my daughter with Slack 10.0 and KDE. I also installed (it's been a long time) Open Office and Opera and a few other odds and ends. I shipped it to her with a print out telling her how to log on and startx.
(The other one I set up as a webserver--that was a learning experience! It took me about three months to get it where I wanted it, then it worked flawlessly until my MySQL database just outgrew the old Pentium chip.)
All she wanted to do was email and web and word processing.
I never got support call number one from her and she used it for years, until, after she got married, her husband wanted a computer capable of editing video (the chip in the one I gave her was not capable of video).
Are there any other suggestions for porn-filtering?
I haven't gotten to try out Dansguardian yet, but just in case it doesn't work out well I'd appreciate any other suggestions the forum comes up with.
also - are there any decent plugins/addons for firefox to help block them? - they aren't really tech-savy so I don't think the ease-of-removal would be an issue, and it might be a simpler solution. (or, at the very least, a nice way to teach them how customizable firefox can be)
I use dansguardian for the actual content filtering and tinyproxy for the traffic redirection (but you could use squid just as well for that).
The above two solutions are still running on my home network today.
Eric
Thank you for the links - the "Parental control on the Linux desktop" looks especially useful.
They won't be on a local network, their mother just wants them to have their own desktop for school work and web browsing and whatever else it is they do that manages to load her windows machines with malware, so a local content filter is all they need, once they have this machine, they'll be refused access to their house's other computers anyway.
Even if you switched to xfce for performance gains, you can still install the bits of kde that you might want on such a system, and there are lots of third party apps that provide education, and others that provide entertainment; loading their system up with some of the best free open source software, often software which is even better than windows counterparts, is a great way to keep them loving their slackbox over former winboxes.
Here's a list of some of the educational apps that come to mind:
kdeedu (contains variety of educational apps, like kgeography and kalzium and ktouch)
stellarium ( astronomy software more impressive than the kstars package coming with kdeedu )
It is usually good to get them studying encryption, so they can test libdvdcss.
As far as entertainment is concerned, you can check out last year's poll on best games... the slower machine might not be able to handle the opengl or sdl rendering in some games, like nexuiz, but it can still play chess just fine.
Good to make sure their mobile accessories mount automagically with fstab entries and correct group and permission settings.
Ipods are such a pain that I steer clear of them, and lean towards droid phones, which mount easily enough and make it easy to control your own media.
Sane/Xsane has gotten way better at recognizing scanners without having to manually create udev rules.
Gimp is great on photo editing, and is part of standard slackware install. Audacity can help them record themselves or record internet streams, etc.
I'm sure there's heaps of others that I've overlooked, but I think having awesome software at their disposal is the best way to keep them from having to go back to windows or mac, because they are happier with their slacbox.
And, regretably, I have on occasion had weird things happen, like apps start opening up with super large fonts, or my panels disappear, and other quirky window behavior; and in most of these instances, deleting the session's cache in the ~/.cache and then logging out and logging back in fixed it. So having some clickable icon that cleans a corrupt cache file helps too.
Last edited by slac-in-the-box; 09-14-2010 at 01:28 PM.
Reason: needed to add hyperlink to the poll on best games
I know most KDE apps will still run under XFCE (I do it on my own machines a lot) but, KDE has a bit more eye-candy, and it might not be as speedy, but it runs better than windows did on this machine still, and in my experience people coming over from windows vista/7 seem to like KDE better than Gnome/XFCE.
I've been looking at educational applications - a slack full install comes with quite a few and there's a lot over at slackbuilds and such, I'll have their mother look through some of them and see if she sees anything she wants me to add on.
as for games... I'm not sure this machine can handle much - they like to play flash games on sites like addictinggames.com, I've gone to the site and it seems to work fine on my own slackware boxes, so, I don't think they'll be too bored, might be a little bit slower than they're use too though (their mother's machine is 2GB and I'm not sure about the processor).
They don't play windows games or games from stores etc. on their PCs - they use an Xbox or Playstation or wii for stuff like that, so the lack of windows games won't be noticed as far as I can tell.
They don't use photoshop or anything now, so if they get started on photo editing they'll be using GIMP, and won't have to break any old habits or re-learn anything, which is nice - people who've never used photoshop seem to take to GIMP a lot faster than long-time photoshop users.
I hadn't thought about audio recording or anything - I'll grab the slackbuild for Audacity as soon as the machine is online though thanks for the link to the slackbuild.
I've had very few problems like that with Slackware13.1, the only one that comes to mind is KDE's defaults resetting on me once, but killing X and starting KDE again fixed it.
So, I've found another potential future slacker, a friend of mine might be taking another old machine I fixed up, just so she has a desktop of her own to surf the web and such for when she's at home.
No games, No hard work, nothing rough on the system at all, she just needs to browse the web and edit text - she's getting a new laptop for all her university work and such, so I don't need to do anything except install flash, really.
I'll just be setting up a new user account, deleting my user account, changing the password for root, and setting it to default runlevel 4 and I'll be teaching her how to use the new OS because she's coming over from only ever using windows.
to try and get this thread back towards the topic:
I set up the machine with slackware13.1 and made limited user accounts for everyone.
set the inittab to default runlevel 4, using KDE's login manager to make it look a bit less scary when the system finishes booting (I kept the transparent boot process though). KDE is a tad slow to start up but once it gets running it's still faster than the old windowsXP install was.
my aunt hasn't come by to pick it up yet so I don't know how her kids are going to take to it, yet.
no difficulties on the install, no funky hardware or compatibility issues, everything worked out of the box, which is always nice.
Hey lostzinzthought, nice work!
As part of my ongoing learning in the world of Linux, I just downloaded my Slackware 13.1 files with the intention of creating my ISO CDs.
My plans for Slackware is to build a simple file server.
I originally two built two servers (both headless) for this purpose using Ubuntu Server Hardy which was pretty straight forward. I have 2 data drives for storage in each server with Samba for sharing. For admin duties, I have Webmin and SSH connectivity.
Although the second server was running and ready for use, I wanted a challenge so I decided to rebuild it using Slackware. Once I learn the ropes in creating the ISOs and going through the install, I'll eventually have it set up similar with Samba, SSH, and Webmin.
As part of my ongoing learning in the world of Linux, I just downloaded my Slackware 13.1 files with the intention of creating my ISO CDs.
My plans for Slackware is to build a simple file server.
I originally two built two servers (both headless) for this purpose using Ubuntu Server Hardy which was pretty straight forward. I have 2 data drives for storage in each server with Samba for sharing. For admin duties, I have Webmin and SSH connectivity.
Although the second server was running and ready for use, I wanted a challenge so I decided to rebuild it using Slackware. Once I learn the ropes in creating the ISOs and going through the install, I'll eventually have it set up similar with Samba, SSH, and Webmin.
Thank you.
Good luck with the slackware server, I've used linux on desktops, laptops, and netbooks as a development platform and for general computing, surfing the web, etc. but never for a server, yet.
LinuxQuestions.org is looking for people interested in writing
Editorials, Articles, Reviews, and more. If you'd like to contribute
content, let us know.