I have been encouraging many friends with kids to try the Linux Operating System mainly because of one major advantage over the other Operating Systems – free software for kids.
Take the Debian distribution with over 25,000 applications for example. There are all kinds of games and educational software that comes bundled with these distributions that it adds up in terms of savings when you consider that a computer game for a Windows Operating Sytem averages about $20.
But the challenge we had was how to protect the children from the dangers of the internet now that everyone pretty much has broadband connection. That is when we ran into some problems. There were not a whole lot of click and install web filters as is available in the Windows market.
So I started searching and spent the most of two days poring through very tedious instructions for what I thought should be a simple solution. I am not a code writer, but I am very comfortable with the Linux command line interface so editing some scripts was not the problem.
I kept thinking, this should not be this difficult. I especially did not want to go through the whole process of installing a full blown filtering application like ClarkConnect, Untangle or Astaro. So I kept searching and I am glad I did.
I finally found a solution so simple it was exhausting just thinking about it. Unfortunately, in my excitement, I failed to note the web site of the author but I will try to locate that document again and give the author full credit.