Is Suse Linux have their own antivirus & firewall?
Do i need to install antivirus like
norton 2005 or other firewall sofware?


Thanks again,


Lancelot

Suse and every other linux distro does have a built in firewall, the IP tables. These can be altered as you need based on what your particular machine is doing.

Antivirus is completely unnecessary on linux, as very very few viruses exist for linux, and those that do exist do virtually nothing unless you are so foolish as to run as full time root. The only reason people run anti-virus on linux is to scan for window$ viruses, and to remove them if you run a mail or file server. Spyware and viruses that effect linux are almost nonexistant.

Peace,
JImBass

Why is Linux is very few virus than Winxp?

Thanks,

Lancelot

Every OS has at least one vulnerability you know.

But an antivirus program for Linux is unnecessary because if virus makers started writing code for Linux that impact would be minor.

For Firewalling most of linux distros use iptables + any front end like firestarter or fwbuilder.
As far as antivirus is concerned it is used on linux based router or gateway servers or mail servers for scanning http traffic and mails.SUSE 9.3 uses amavis and clam for local desktop use.

from what i understand there are so much less virii for a linux OS because it isn't AS widely distrubuted, which it really is, alot of servers and webhosts and us humans rely on linux machines because it's simply better... alot of computers come with the other os and it's attractive to code viruses for the "mass" another opinion i'm having is people running linux are more computer savvy, and alot of "newbs" don't use it from fear of the "difficulty", and who wants to try to effect the uneffectable.. o: ... another thing is linux is recommended to be run not as a superuser and shouldn't be. running as root or superuser a virus will have full access as the root user has, running not as superuser (which should always be the case unless you need configuring something or..some other simple few second task..) there are not those privllages to execute or write to targets effecting the entire computer. another being linux, it's free, in source and if you wanted to see how a program is made up you can, and therefore could find malcious code..well that's my opinion, anybody want to back any of those points up?

Every Linux distribution includes a firewall. Usually installation of it is optional but enabled by default.

No.

Viruses for *nix are very, very rare and exist mainly as "proof of concept" programs, written by antivirus vendors to "scare" Linux users into buying their products. As far as viruses go, you can count the number of real viruses for Linux on your fingers but those viruses simply do not spread.

The WORST that a virus can do on Linux is wipe out your user account directory - unless you're foolish and run everything as root all the time. Permissions are required to wipe out your drive.

If you run an email server though, you DO want a virus scanner on your SMTP gateway to protect Windows clients from Windows viruses. You don't really have to worry about Macintosh viruses all that much any more since fewer and fewer people are running MacOS 9.x or earlier.

Things you DO have to worry about on *nix are:

* rootkits (I run rkhunter and chkrootkit daily and have the logs emailed to me on my box)
* "tainted" rescue CDs containing trojan horses or otherwise-malicious code (I was trying several out the other night and discovered one that wipes out /boot. I was not happy because I was being lazy and testing them on a production workstation. On the bright side it presented an excuse to install the Suse 9.3 upgrade I've been postponing)
* stubborn people running everything as root
* Linspire users who run everything as root (Bad Idea(tm))

--Kim

Sorry for this stupid question but how do i not do that. I have not yet installed linux but viruses are a big worry to me so i dont want to get one, so how would i install my linux and set it not to run as root, and what is root exactly do you mean run on the same hard drive as windows, as i was wanting a dual boot partition.

Linux and other Unix like operating systems enable you to create users with limited permissions. If you need to make system changes there are several ways to do this whilst still logged in as a normal user. You can temporarily switch to root (the administrator) using the command line or use graphical tools like kdesu and gnomesu to run some apps as root. You can also use a tool called sudo to give yourself some permissions to run certain programs with administrator privileges.

Dear User
Let me tell you that unix like Os were there before the other os windowzzzzzzz come in to existance.So its not that windows is more in use and not linux. There are millions of linux +unix users around the globe.Whats the main point is that its been developed by community so the community whos using it wont write viruses for what they have created.Till now there are only 3 known viruses in linux and patches for them have been released ages ago.

i heard there were about 40 and

More like 7, really, and most of those are proofs of concept.

There ARE more if you count apache worms out there (mainly OpenSSL exploits) but those can't be counted as Linux virus/worms since they attack an application, and are cross-platform. Even in those cases the exploit is confined to apache (unless you're a bonehead and set up apache to run from / and/or have the process run as user root).