To whom maybe interested,
tried to use avg antivirus for linux. Perhaps best shutting out nasties via a firewall but to rectify those that get though requires a knowlegde of shell that some don't have an anti virus seems to to promise is a good idea, so what do poeple think of installing the avg version of thier antivirus option?

I think there is really no point. Your chances of damaging the system by user error are orders of magnitude higher than getting a serious virus on the machine.

Why do you think you need an AV app?

Personally I'm probably gonna get one, but only because I want to create a small catalog of Windows viruses, testing them on an XP virtual machine. But other than this, the only reason for a virus scanner on Linux is if it is regularly serving files to Windows machines, particularly directly from the internet, with little to no human interaction.

That pretty much is the only reason you would want one - to protect Windows users that you share files with.

To add another possible reason: troubleshooting. I frequently have Windows users bring me unreadable disks and machines that have mysteriously "slowed down" to the point of being unusable. I can mount the disk, in a usb enclosure if necessary, and run a virus scan on it. And for spyware, Ad-Aware works via wine.

Have any of you even considered the fact that by not using an anti-virus application, you are assisting in the spread of those virus's...

Just because they can come into and out of a linux box without causing problems, doesnt mean your not sending them to your friends who use windows....



This subject has been a debate in the linux community for a number of years, and the linux community as a whole have adopted the idea that by using an anti-virus on there systems, it will assist in reducing the spread and infection of systems...

if you are having trouble installing avg, then either ask for help or try one of the others, like klam or something...
the installers for most anti-virus app's is usually pretty straight forward tho, and asking for help is what the forum is all about...

I don't send any files, except .java, and .doc files to my programming teacher and .cpp, .txt files for my friend who is working on a sourceforge project with me. I think its kind of hard to send files with windows viruses in them to other people with out knowing it. I don't know this "linux community" who decided that and I don't feel I should run an anti-virus just to scan the files that I wrote to see if they have viruses in them.

Huh?

Most viruses need to actually infect and run the host system in order to replicate and spread. Windows worms and viruses simply won't do anything on a Unix machine, and will have no way of replicating themselves. The only way you could spread a Windows virus is if you downloaded an infected file and then sent that same file back out to a Windows user; the infection won't spread to other files on your system like it could if you were on Windows.

To that end, virus protection is important on something like a Samba file server, certainly an email server as well. In situations where you will be storing or transmitting files for Windows clients to use, AV is a good idea (and really, a necessity), but a desktop computer does not fit that description (unless you are some sort of a software pirate, perhaps).

As for the "community as a whole" bit, since you are the only person in the topic who even mentioned the concept, I think the "community" you are referring to is clearly on it's own tangent.

I run f-prot on my Slack12 system, although it is mainly to encourage my windows using kids to think about security (if dad does it, maybe we should!)
We do occasionally find malware on the windows, but we know it's not coming from my Linux box