I'm coming from a windows background and today ran my first cd live copy of pclinuxos.

The OS worked fine. Coming from Windows, I'm used to installing the OS, applying the service packs/patches, installing antivirus, installing third party firewall.

With pclinuxus, I just burned the image to a cd and booted off of it.

I would assume I would need to perform the same tasks with linux as I do with Windows, I'm just not sure how I would do that if nothing is being installed on the hard drive.

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you

Jason

If you are running off the Cd, there's nothing to do.
If you used it to install Linux onto the hard-drive, Linux comes with a firewall built-in (google iptables).
Also, although I believe there are 1 or 2 products that claim to be Linux AV, last time I checked there were only 6 (?) proof of concept viruses in the lab and none (?) in the wild.
Most people do not have AV for Linux.
The best place to check is the Security forum.
Most distros have an auto-update check built-in, but I'm not familiar with PCLinuxOS.

You can still change settings, install drivers etc in live mode (ie NVidia drivers) but you cannot keep them after reboot because they are not stored. This can help basically to test how things work, then if everything runs fine for you you can install the whole OS. PCLinuxOS uses Synaptic (a front-end of apt-get package manager if I'm not mistaken) for installing apps and drivers and if you use the reload button you get an option on the left panel of it to choose upgradable packages. Marking what's under it, works pretty much as a system and app update. The only thing is that you have to do it manually from time to time (unlike other distros). It also has a built-in firewall (which can be configured or even disabled) and you can check ClamAV for antivirus software,but ClamAV (or maybe its front-end KlamAV) didn't actually worked in my PCLOS.

I'm surprised you didn't say something like:

• Install Windows
• Run Windows update several times, including multiple re-boots
• Install various 3rd-party drivers from random CDs that you have to find
• Install applications from more random CDs
• Find all the CD keys
• etc, etc etc

After you install Linux on a hard drive, find all you drivers already in place, find core applications already installed, and discover the power of the package manager, then the advantage of Linux start to come home.

But---install it on your hard drive--running from live CD is meant only for "kicking the tires"