I was missing this app from my Linux Mint days, I don't usually enjoy 'forking' a program without a good reason. I was digging into the code and found that not only was this program designed for Linux Mint but it also used their dependencies (which disgusted me) since a GPL program should be able to be used by everyone and not just a single distro. So behold the 'rather generic' Domain Blocker.
I'll work on it a bit more over the weekend and I'm planning on separating the dependencies on mint-common and packaging them as part of the program itself. Changing the name on some of the windows and cleaning it up. If anyone wants a copy I'll provide a .deb on Monday/Tuesday or if Wimpy would like to incorporate it into 15.10? I'll upload the source to be put onto Launchpad.
It’s on my dropbox, though I have not managed to get a working .deb I’ve included a readme and it’s fairly simple to cleanly install. Source is included, little is changed from Clem’s original source and it’s still GPL’d under version 3 (as far as I can tell).
I’ve since taken it down from my Github (due to lack of interest really). But if someone would like me to, I can easily port the newest version from mint’s trunk on github. The port is actually rather trivial to do for any python programmer (- + 2 hours).
I've taken a look at the old nanny code on github and yeah, the code is old and crusty and is heavily dependant on certain things. Though it wouldn't be so hard to add timing features to this one. But then again it depends on if people are interested or not
I’m not sure if people realise just how important it is to have Nanny or a fork of Nanny available to parents.
Some people have said/do say that linux is all about freedom. Freedom always comes with a price - responsibility. Until young children learn/are tought how to use a computer/the internet in a safe and responsible way their parents carry this responsibility for them. They can’t be standing behind their sons and daughters all the time. They need a tool to help.
One of the arguments for giving a child a computer/access to a computer with a proprietary OS is the availability of a “parental control” feature.
If we want to make “moving to linux” a viable option for parents of young children a tool such as “Nanny” is one of the “must have” criteria.
Please believe that what you are contributing here is very important. And will remain important.
It is true that a lot of young children, at least in “rich” societies, are given mobile 'phones at increasingly young ages. Having “Nanny” on Ubuntu-Mate won’t help them directly. But even these younsters could benefit from having first learned how to interact with the seductive/addictive nature of computer games/internet content via a linux computer running a “Nanny” -like tool that helped their parents teach them how to cope.
@Wimpy Hallo Mr. Wimpress. Sorry for posting a direct link to you twice in two days. But you are a busy chap, with a life, and all sorts of things to do. I just wanted to make sure that this revived thread and the good work of ad4m appears on your “radar”.
If @ad4m were to create a PPA for his forked Domain Blocker, then it could certainly be added to the Software Boutique. As a father I do tje see benefit of such a tool.
However, reviving the original GNOME Nanny (will require significant porting) would be great, because it has a much greater and flexible feature set ️
No worries, I’m actually doing both. I’ll probably package up ‘MintNanny’ into a .deb and onto a PPA soon since now it’s compatible with any GNU/Linux distro (works on Raspbian too). The old Nanny from GNOME is being de-crusted mostly it’s build-system checking for old packages and 32bit python libs. Then the real work begins with making it work ‘correctly’ on MATE.
It no longer requires any ‘mint’ specific libraries. The source is on my github: Yaya src code. Yaya is filipino for ‘nanny’.
If you have any improvements (or someone else does) feel free to submit a pull request, I almost always approve them. I don’t abandon my packages and I’m a maintainer for quite a few programs (Larn being the most popular). I’ll let wimpy decide if this fork should be in the Software Boutique.
@Wimpy The original nanny’s source will be on my github soon. I’ve got it to compile, but it needs a ton of work to ‘function’, mostly related to python dbus. With a 2 year old, my programming time outside of work is… limited
This will go in the Boutique ️ Thank you very much for working on this.
I have a young family too, so I completely understand that time is limited. I’m very interested in how your revival of the original GNOME Nanny progresses, please continue tag me in your updates to ensure I don’t miss them ️
