hi, wow

bought my first computer two years ago with windows pre installed, and about a month ago was pretty tired of it crashing every other day and got reading about Linux.
other things like hiding behind 3 or 4 different programs just to keep the saftey level pushed up and windows media player trying to contact microsoft HQ at every opportunity, being pinged every minuite and loads more things all added up,
in the end it was Linux or bust

just cleaned windows from the HD and had a clean install of Mandriva from 3 CD's

to tell you the truth its brought me back to life, feel at one with the computer and not as if im being conned by big profiting companies every two minuites,

now i ask you, if you know of any steps that are worth taking, do you know if i need to do critical updates or patches for bugs and viruses?
do you know if they is anything vital that should be read or downloaded and will i be attacked by hackers at any point, i didnt choose a firewall at installation and security is at standard.

imput is appreciated

if you have broadband, you'll want a firewall. couldn't hurt to use one with dial-up either. viruses are not an issue and defraging is not necessary. i haven't used mandriva for some time, but i'm sure they have some mechanism for automatically checking for updates.

thankz for imput
yes rshaw, adsl broadband

seems that Mandriva comes with a firewall called shorewall, do you know if this is any good or are there better ones to be hooked up with,

Shorewall is good. The default set-up should be fine. If you want to learn about shorewall;
http://www.shorewall.net/shorewall_quickstart_guide.htm
Another thing you can do is see what ports you have open;
nmap localhost
also if you use a modem to connect most have a firewall;
nmap (modems address)

These might help with Mandriva

http://easyurpmi.zarb.org/
ftp://mirror.cs.wisc.edu/pub/mirrors...icial/updates/
http://rute.2038bug.com/index.html.gz

thanks for further imput

typing "nmap localhost" brings up the following

Starting nmap 3.81 ( http://www.insecure.org/nmap/ ) at 2005-09-09 23:29 BST
Interesting ports on tiscali.co.uk (137.0.0.1):
(The 1659 ports scanned but not shown below are in state: closed)

PORT STATE SERVICE
25/tcp open smtp
111/tcp open rpcbind
718/tcp open unknown
6000/tcp open X11