Hi

I have young children who have computers. They used to have Macs which were running Safari, which had a great built in restricted web access and you could lock down the whole system so it was tamper proof. They moved to PCs as their Macs were getting a bit old and they use a lot of Flash sites and Flash is not well developed for PPC Macs.

So at present they are running Windows XP on some good spec P4 Celeron 2.5Ghz machines, but with all the anti-virus and anti-malware software it makes the machines crawl. They are also using a kiddy safe browser called KidZui which I think is a kiddy front end for IE, it too is really bad. Its slow and chokes all the time, but it provides a massive selection of preapproved sites, vids and games.

I ran Ubuntu on from a Live CD on one of theirs and it screamed. They both have the same machine and running one with Windows XP minus safety software and the other from a Live CD, the Live CD beat it hands down.

KidZui is a Windows only thing and I wondered if there was anything like it for Linux, then I could dual boot Win/Linux for the odd occasion they might need Windows.

I found some kiddy friendly distros but I am just after a way of letting them only have access to certain stuff on the web without too much hassle and not a whole new distro for me to learn. There was an excellent Firefox addon called Glubble we used for a while that offered a platform independent safe surfing environment but it no longer works.

My kids are only 6 and 8 so it is only sites like CBeebies, NickJnr and Lego that they need access to.

Simon