[ale] Niece's laptop

[Dow Hurst]

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 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!

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