Hello!

I'm a relative newbie to Linux (I can make my way around a Solaris or AIX box to do development work, but no *nix installation experience), so finding this site was a Godsend! I have a couple quick questions I'm hoping you can answer:

1) Can you confirm that Linux can read/write from a NTFS fileshare? Will this cause any issues for Windows XP accessing the same partition, if setting up for dual boot?

2) Does anyone have any reliable recommendations for firewall and/or antivirus software for SUSE Linux? While I understand that the odds you would get a virus on a Linux box are significantly less than Windows, its definitely not impossible.

Thanks in advance for your help, and I hope to return the favor to the community someday!

1) not if you want the data. read is okish. write is still a bit lethal. blame M$. use fat32 for common shared space.

2)clamav is very popular open source antivirus, AVG do a linux client too. Firewalls are a different thing, you will only get one type of firewall (iptables / netfilter) it's just the gui you use to jiggle it about, and most distro's have their own tools for managing it. personally i used to use firestarter.

i worked with ntfs on linux sue 10 and sue 9.3 the read is totally fine but when it comes to write you may get into problems back in windows. for my case the files got corrupted. you should also keep in mind that it may become a security problem as anyone can read the sam files that keep the passowrd in windows from a linux environment.

as for antivirus, i had no problem so far. now that i think about it my own curiousity to change things around linux are far more dangerous than any win32 virus that i ever seen or heard about

rgr - ntfs read is fine, write is a death wish. Use fat32 or NFIS, SMB something for shared info. There are a few ways to mount a linux drive (ext2/3) in windows, so there is a way to get data across in a pinch. I think it's called ext3fs -- google around, there's a few.

When it comes to firewall, suse has a decent firewall that you can fool around with in yast fairly easily. As for antivirus, I know xandros comes with one but not suse. Personally, I don't use an anti-virus, but I would look at AVG -- I am very pleased with it in windows.