[ale] Niece's laptop

[Mark Wright]

On Aug 5, 2006, at 1:53 AM, Dow Hurst wrote:

> Mark,
> I did not set the Google preferences to Safe Search strict.  Left  
> it at
> Safe Search off.  Then googled for images from phun.org just to see  
> what
> would happen.  Sure enough I got objectionable content.  Now, I  
> haven't
> tweaked any of DanGuardian's settings.  I've left them at the default
> value.  Any word content could block a web page based on the filtering
> but an innocuous title would let an objectionable picture thru.  There
> isn't a good way to prevent that unless Google would allow a password
> protected Safe Search setting.  The user has too much control over the
> web site preferences.  I'm thinking about this.  Any ideas would be  
> welcome.

I see what you mean.  I have never used Google images much.  I am  
looking through /etc/dansguardian/  and there are several banned  
lists that may be able to block some of these images but it looks  
like you will have to block lots good stuff too.  I am going to check  
Dan's support groups for some ideas.


> I got Window Maker running and it was the answer to a pretty but
> lightweight desktop that didn't need alot of configuration.  I had
> several issues in that tinyproxy required some mods on the rpm install
> to get the init script to work.  DanGuardian had an init script but it
> had to be installed along with log rotation.  The sound system in the
> IBM 770Z needed alsa to be started and then restarted to keep some
> glitch from causing the first sound emitted to be a loud screech.  I
> used the skeleton file for the init scripts to fake a dummy alsasound
> restart that happened after alsa was started.  Was proud of that!

I am ashamed.  I have a Ubuntu installation that is over six months  
old and I still haven't fixed the sound.  Priorities.

> The big one was the Edimax wifi card.  It is the RT61 driver that is
> used and isn't in suse 10.1 by default as it is rather new.  The Linux
> drivers were on the CD but I grabbed the latest from the web site.   
> The
> funny thing was that the drivers were source code with firmware and
> example config files.  The drivers followed an older install standard
> that didn't fit with the current /etc/sysconfig/network style of
> installation.  Firmware and dat files went into /etc/wireless/.   
> Luckily
> ifplugd figured it out while unfortunately Network Manager didn't.   
> If I
> hadn't tried to get the iptables rules to force browsing thru the  
> proxy
> rather than leaving it voluntary, I'd be okay.  Somehow I messed that
> part up trying to integrate with the Susefirewall install.  I handed
> over the laptop to my brother-in-law today.  I think I can walk him  
> thru
> the first connection and then ssh in to fix things up.
>
> It is actually a nice machine now for 128MB of RAM:
> plays DVDs
> chats with Kopete
> defaults to WindowMaker
> runs firefox nicely
> runs abiword or gnumeric well
> webbrowsing protection via tinyproxy and dansguardian
>
> A combination I thought important for the resources available to make
> snappy was web browsing and chatting simultaneously.  That worked well
> with Konsole, Firefox, Kopete, and the webfilter all running at  
> once.  I
> cut back on Novell's Zen daemon, auditd, powerd, powersaved, nfs, and
> some others that were not necessary for her machine.  Now if you run
> yast2 or smart to update, then forget it and walk away to read a book!
> It is 30minutes to a couple of hours for updates to finish since the
> process is fat and requires probably 256MB of RAM to fit in memory
> completely.  I exit runlevel 5 to be at runlevel 3 before starting the
> process and still swap 60MB easily.
>
> Thanks for the suggestions and help!
> Dow
>
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