Well, sort of. It was called Microsoft Windows XP Professional. I was running a dual boot setup with Suse Linux 8.1 until yesterday. I hardly ever used Windows any more but yesterday morning I was feeling kind of strange so I booted into Winbloze, logged onto the internet and checked my e-mail. All of a sudden, with no warning whatsoever, my machine rebooted itself. I don't know if it had a virus or not but I have heard of some kind of blaster worm that causes your machine to do that. Anyway, I wasn't about to wait around and find out. I deleted the Windows partition and reformatted it for Linux extended and reconfigured my boot setup so that I could never run Windoze on this machine again. I feel like I've been liberated. Oh well, just thought I'd share.

that is one way to deal with viruses.
I actually have a copy of the lovebug sitting in a text file on my linux machine just for fun. Not hurting anyone out there -- Funny thing is that Norton Anti-Virus on my dad's win95 computer complains anytime I go into the directory with that file.

5 days free.... of winblows.....but. Are there any good "free" antivirus programs for linux?

Brian

There were quite a few discussions on this a week or two ago, discussing the merits of having antivirus software on linux (whether you need it or not) and where to get it if you felt you needed it (If I recall correctly, there were a few recommendations) I'm certain a quick search of the forums on here will tell you all you need.

it's cool that you got rid of winblows... what i do on pcs with both winblows and linux is that after winblows is installed exactly how i or the client want it i make a tar file in linux of the win32 partition... if anything happens to winblows then it's just a matter of backing-up your new shit and untaring your system (partition) backup...

for example:

rm -fvr /mnt/windows/*

tar xvzf win32backup.tar.gz -C /mnt/windows/

would restore windows to like-new condition after you had made the system tarball... then you'd just have to extract the document tarballs you made to the appropiate windows directories...

i think that what sucks about having both on one pc is that when you are in windows, linux becomes just as vulnerable to malicious software and users as windows... you can go into the linux partitions and edit shit without having to deal with any of linux's security features... EXCEPT encryption... but hell, someone could destroy all your data on your linux partitions through windows wheather it's encrypted or not... that is not good. by having only linux on my pc i can feel safe when i let someone use it... even if they have the worst intentions... they are limited to their user account... they'd have to make the system boot to a cd or floppy by clearing the cmos jumper on the motherboard, etc... etc... etc... in order to compromise it. but you an get through this by using x terminals and putting the x server in a heavily fortified underground nuclear bunker...

=)