Questions about viruses, compiling, customizing/building distros, etc.
OK, I have a few questions that I have searched for and have sort of found answers for but would really like some clarity.
1. What's the deal with viruses for a linux desktop, will I be safe without an AV program? Lots of sites, such as mandrakelinux.com say that linux is almost immune to viruses. Also, it seems as though most linux users don't care about having an antivirus program on their desktop machine. 2. How about source code? I am running Fedora 3, and I noticed that most software comes as source RPMS and as binary RPMS. Are there any performance benefits to compiling the source myself? 3. Distro's. As I have gathered from reading there are "out of the box" distro's such as ubuntu, fedora, mandrake, and etc. that should install rather quickly and get up and running with minimal installation. There are also the distro's that require you to hand build them and edit lots of configuration scripts and stuff. I am guessing that the "hand built" distro's perform better. Is that true? Also, are the performance benefits based on: - the fact that the packages are compiled from source - the fact that there will not be as much unneeded stuff running - or both? Thanks a lot for your help. So far, the users at this stite have been very patient and friendly and have really made me want to switch over to Linux as much as possible. I have been having a ball with my Fedora install. here is a screenshot: http://www.bmore.us/screen2.png |
1) They just don't make an AV app for linux that finds linux virii as they don't really exist. Linux AV apps are for servers to keep windows clients clean. Set up a firewall and that is about it at this stage.
2) not really. Compiling the kernel for you CPU type can help a little... 3) Ready to run distros can be just as quick. Some are built for speed, some for features. You need to decide what you want. I use mandrake, which can be slower, but is feature packed by default. performance benefit comes from the ability to customize EVERYTHING. you run what you want - a heavy KDE desktop, or light wm, the services you need, and so forth... |
Re: Questions about viruses, compiling, customizing/building distros, etc.
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useless and aren't an issue. clamav is an open source av that runs on Linux (and Windows, I think) but, as indicated, it's mostly for cleaning Windows-based mail. 2. Performance improvements on a per app basis are minimal but present. The main benefit of compiling a given app is customization and just knowing more about it. For instance, your distro may believe bluefish is a Gnome app and build in a truckload of dependencies. If you build it yourself, you can free it from a lot of that. There are many other examples. 3. As a rule, yes, source-based distros perform better. One reason people may confuse Slackware with source-based distros is that it performs nearly on par with them. The reason is both - specific optimzations and cleaner systems. Slackware primarily takes advantage of the second, since it's mostly '-O2 -march=i486 -mcpu=i686'. But that also prevents over-optimizing. It's not like compiling from source just automatically makes stuff faster. If you do '-O99 -funroll-loops -optimize-like-a-loon' you'll probably end up with slower and buggier and more crash-prone apps. So compiling a given app basically gives you better control and some performance; carefully compiling the whole system gives you much more control and noticeable performance. But all distros are built from source, obviously - it's just who's doing the building and with what motivations - you or the distro. Most 'binary' distros are slower because they try to be all things to all people on all hardware, or at least a significant subset of that. Disclaimer: all this is just my opinion, obviously. |
Re: Re: Questions about viruses, compiling, customizing/building distros, etc.
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Re: Re: Re: Questions about viruses, compiling, customizing/building distros, etc.
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Sorry if that's not much help, but few things specific stick out - basically just dive into anything and everything you can find. |
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