Linux for Kids

Have to try this for the girls at home

Qimo is a desktop operating system designed for kids. Based on the open source Ubuntu Linux desktop, Qimo comes pre-installed with educational games for children aged 3 and up.

Qimo’s interface has been designed to be intuitive and easy to use, providing large icons for all installed games, so that even the youngest users have no trouble selecting the activity they want.

Firefox & Google: fix for search results not in English

So I use Firefox and mainly use Google (either directly or via the FF search engine bar) for searching on the Internet.

Because of HP’s infrastructure for some reason our external gateway tells Google that I’m originating in France even though I’m actually in the Netherlands.
So despite the fact that I speak a little French it’s pretty annoying that usually the Google interface and results lists are all in the wrong language.

So if you want to make the Google search box in Firefox always to give results in English, you need to modify the file "google.xml", which is part of the Firefox installation.

How to:

1. First of all, close every Firefox instance.
2. Open the folder "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\searchplugins\" by clicking Start, then Run, in the Open box type the folder path and then click OK.
3. Make a copy of the existing "google.xml" to for example "google1.xml" in the same directory "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\searchplugins\".
   This is to keep a back up copy of the original Firefox installation, in case you need to revert back to it.
4. Open the file "google.xml" with Notepad or your favourite text editor
5. Add this statement "<Param name="hl" value="en"/>" at the top of the "Param" list.

   The last part of the XML will look like this

      1: <Url type="text/html" method="GET" template="http://www.google.com/search">

      2: <Param name="hl" value="en"/>

      3: <Param name="q" value="{searchTerms}"/>

      4: <Param name="ie" value="utf-8"/>

      5: <Param name="oe" value="utf-8"/>

      6: </Url>

      7:  

      8: </SearchPlugin>

    

6. Save the file "google.xml" in the folder "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\searchplugins\" and close it. Restart Firefox and see the results.

I have no idea how to do this in Internet Explorer