Parental Controls – Different Settings for Different Users

parental-controls

Does anyone know of a good way to set up some sort of parental controls so that one user account is subject to them, but not another?

A couple of friends of mine use Ubuntu and have kids (7 to 10 years old) who use the family computer. They'd like to have some blocking of adult sites. They're not going to supervise all the time, which I know might be ideal, but there we go. And they're not particularly technical, so they don't want to have to run scripts to turn the parental controls on and off regularly, but they can cope with having different accounts for different people. I haven't found a great way of doing this. I am pretty technical, so I'm happy to spend some time at the command line to set it up, but then it needs to just work.

Please don't just link to DansGuardian. If your answer doesn't address the different user account aspect, I will vote it down. If you want to talk about general parental controls that apply to all users then please start a new question – I'm sure that plenty of people would be interested in it, and I'll link to it from this question.

Best Answer

Gnome Nanny looks like it would meet the needs of your friends perfectly. To quote the website:

Gnome Nanny is an easy way to control what your kids are doing in the computer. You can limit how much time a day each one of them is browsing the web, chatting or doing email. You can also decide at which times of the day the can do this things. Gnome Nanny filters what web pages are seen by each user, so you can block all undesirable webs and have your kids enjoy the internet with ease of mind, no more worries!

Nanny Admin Console

Nanny Web Filter

As you can see, Nanny can set different restrictions for each account. nanny 2.29.4-0ubuntu4 is available in the maverick and natty universe repositories. It is also part of Edubuntu. Screenshots of Nanny running on Edubuntu are available on the Edubuntu website.

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