Remove web-browsing/web-search from desktop

[alandmoore]

Is there a way to completely remove the capability to search and browse the web from endless OS? I’m evaluating its use for public workstations in our library’s children’s section, but one of the stipulations is not allowing internet access.

I can remove Chrome, but chromium remains and cannot be uninstalled or disabled by parental controls. The search bar doesn’t seem to be removable or customizable in this regard either.

[LeandroStanger]

I can remove Chrome, but chromium remains and cannot be uninstalled or disabled by parental controls.

Currently it is not possible to uninstall chromium because it is a special application

The search bar doesn’t seem to be removable or customizable in this regard either.

At this time it is not possible to remove the search bar

[egrath]

At the current time, you have two options:

• Block Internet Traffic for everything except the necessary destinations (Endless Repositories, …) on your Internet Gateway for the Public PCs
• Block Internet Traffic on a per-Host Basis with the Linux-integrated Firewall “IPtables”. This one is probably more complex to set up than the first one, but in case you might want to dig in, start with: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/IptablesHowTo (even if it’s for Ubuntu, IPtables is the same everywhere, and the startup configuration can be used without any changes)

Personally, i would recommend you to use the first one. I did it for a school some time ago using DNS-interception and OpenDNS Filtering to block everything except some educational pages like Wikipedia. I used a cheap DD-WRT based Router for performing the necessary tasks.

[ramcq]

We ship a script to set up iptables with local only firewall (eos-firewall-localonly) which prevents computers connecting to any resources outside the Endless update servers and the local network. You can enable/disable with sudo eos-firewall-localonly start or stop, and sudo systemctl enable eos-firewall-localonly to have it enabled at every boot. This entirely blocks the access to the internet for every app on the system apart from the updater and app center.

We hope to allow the browser to be disabled via parental controls in a release later this year. I notice also that there doesn’t seem to be a way to disable the “Internet” search provider in the shell, which is a bit odd. You can only disable the entire desktop search, which would be a bit of a shame!