What is the future of Parental Control in Ubuntu?

[Jeff Gosden]

Hello,

The Problem:

Since Ubuntu now uses LightDM/GTK3 the Gnome Nanny package is broken in Precise and Quantal. Nanny is currently dependant on GDM/GTK2 which is no longer used in the 12.04 LTS and 12.10 releases.

At present there is no SINGLE (and working) installable solution for managing Parental Control in Ubuntu 12.04 / 12.10.

Some options do exist to manage a degree of parental control (without a unified GUI), which comprise of:

1. Dans Guardian (tricky to configure for anyone new to Linux / Ubuntu)
2. OpenDNS.com / SafeDNS.com (3rd party content filtering)
3. Timekpr (currently being re-written for 12.04/12.10 support with the earliest release around August 2013)

Unfortunately, there are still elements within the Unity Desktop evironment which can be changed, even if a STANDARD account is used for a Child. For example, there is no way to lock-down the Network Manager settings with an Admin password (or prompt for an admin password if a child attempts to change these settings) thus allow any child who is savvy enough to bypass any 3rd party content filtering (e.g. OpenDNS).

The existing User Account management is very limited when assigning privileges to a standard account.

Going forward, wouldn't it be great if Ubuntu had something like this ...

Mac OS X:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50zZHT6yW3Q

or ...

Windows 7:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qbpncl81GEg

or even ..

Net Nanny:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Z4qu54CUJQ

Question:
Is there any kind of roadmap or strategy for Parental Control in Ubuntu?

Some activity on the issues can be tracked here:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/nanny/+bug/877318

There is a PPA for Precise, but nothing currently for Quantal:
https://launchpad.net/~boamaod/+archive/nanny-test