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Parental controls for Debian that stay on your own computer
For children aged 4–10 · no account · no cloud · nothing leaves the device
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The child's screen, and the parent watching it live from a phone. The child sees it.
BioKids turns a Debian 13 computer into one a young child can use on their own. They
log in by tapping their picture, land in a launcher of big tiles instead of a desktop,
and are told — out loud — when their time is nearly up. The parent sets the rules from
a panel on the same computer or on their phone. Time is counted in a way a changed clock
cannot cheat, harmful sites are closed for the children's accounts only, and nothing
about the family leaves the machine.
It comes as a ready-to-install ISO (Debian 13 with BioKids, which installs beside
Windows if you want) and as Debian packages for a computer that already runs Debian.
BioKids 2.0.0. The packages build, pass lintian, install, upgrade and purge on
Debian 13, and the ISO was installed in VirtualBox (BIOS and UEFI) and beside Windows
on real hardware. What comes next is in docs/ROADMAP.md.
Why BioKids
🏠 It stays at home. No telemetry, no analytics, no account, no cloud. The panel
reaches your phone over your own private network, never through a BioKids server —
there is no BioKids server.
👀 The child knows. Supervision is always visible. The first run explains what the
family can see, and while a parent watches the screen, the child sees it says so.
🤖 An assistant that runs on the computer. Sor Bana answers a child's questions
with a language model on the machine itself. No question goes to a cloud.
📱 Your phone is the remote. Grant ten more minutes, lock the screen, answer a
request, or watch the screen live — from anywhere, over your own private network.
⏱️ Time that cannot be cheated. Minutes are counted with the kernel's boot clock, so
moving the system clock changes nothing — and the change is written in the audit log.
🧸 Made for ages 4 to 10. Big tiles, a ring of minutes, buttons that speak for
children who cannot read yet, and two companions, Zio and Sio, who tell them what is
happening.
Sor Bana: an assistant that never leaves the computer
A child types a question — or says it, if the parent allows the microphone — and gets
an answer for their age, in the language they asked in. The answer comes from a
language model running on the computer (Gemma through llama.cpp, Whisper for
speech), checked against an offline Wikipedia. Nothing is sent anywhere: an ordinary
question is answered and forgotten.
It refuses what a child should not ask, and the parent sees what it refused. It is a
separate package, off until a parent downloads it from the panel (with a progress bar)
and turns it on for a child, and it needs 7 GB of memory or more. In the English
corner, Sio uses the same model to chat with a child in simple English.
The screen, live, on your phone
From the panel — at the computer, or on your phone anywhere — press Watch live and
you see your child's screen as it is now, about one picture a second.
- The child is told. While you watch, the launcher and the bar over every app show
"👁 Mom can see your screen now". That sign cannot be turned off.
- Nothing is recorded. Each picture replaces the last in memory and is never
written anywhere. Leaving the page ends the watch.
- The family can see it happened. Every start is in the audit log.
It is the only time BioKids ever looks at a child's screen, and only while a parent is
looking.
More screens
Features
For the child
- A launcher instead of a desktop. Big tiles for the apps and sites the parent
chose, a ring with the minutes left, and the same buttons over every app: home, the
app's own volume, a fullscreen button for apps that open small, and a close that works
even on an app that will not close. No desktop, no settings, no terminal.
- Switch without starting over. Open apps and sites wait at the bottom of the
launcher: stop a video, play a game, and come back to the video where it was.
- Login by picture, two age bands (4–7 and 8–10), and tiles and screens that read
themselves aloud for children who cannot read yet.
- Zio and Sio, a mother's and a father's voice, speak the warnings at 10, 5 and
1 minute — espeak-ng out of the box, a natural Piper voice one button away, or the
parent's own recorded voice.
- Learning corners. Turkish reading in first grade's order, from letters to
sentences, and an English corner with Sio.
- Ask a grown-up. More time, a site or an app: the request reaches the parent's
phone, is answered in one tap, and the child is told the answer.
- My voice (Sesim): the child can send their parent a recording of their own.
This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗
