On Tue, 28 Dec 2004 09:51:23 -0800 (PST), Appeet <appeet@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Coming from the windows world, the first thing I get
> for my computer is an antivirus software. So my
> question is - Are there any good opensource freeware
> :) anti virus programs!
ELCA ("Everybody Loves ClamAV").
> (Or) Do we even need one on
> linux! :)
No, not really. Unless
1) you are on a network with Windows PC's and you want to use your
Linux Anti-Virus software to scan network drives for Windows viruses,
or
2) you are concerned about accidentally spreading Windows viruses in
your email messages, and you want some software to protect you from
your own mistakes (in my experience, this is kind of hard to do,
unless you manually forward viro-spam around), or
3) you just find it convenient to have ClamAV filter out viro-spam
before it clutters your inbox. SpamAssassin may be simpler for this
purpose.
It's possible that there will be more Linux viruses in future, as
Linux gets more popular, but the lack of Linux viruses has more to do
with Linux's architecture than with its lack of popularity. So some
people run ClamAV "just in case," while some other people don't think
it's worth it. We haven't really decided what we think in our case,
where we mostly have Windows PC's and some Macs and some Linux, all
sharing files--so it will probably pay to get a single, commercial,
cross-platform solution.
--Matt
