Anti-virus revisited...

I remember writing a short post (read here) about why Ubuntu users don't need an anti-virus. However, over the past few months, my opinion on this has changed.

For starters, linux (unix in general) is more secure by design unless you are the village idiot who insist on logging into your Ubuntu setup as root (you actually need to hack this as Ubuntu by default prevents users from logging is as the root user). What few viruses/worms that do exist can only affect the user as per his/her access rights to the system.

However (I did say I've changed my opinion on this), Ubuntu users do receive a lot of files from other users who (gasp!) use Windoze (and Macs) and these platforms do have viruses/worms. What we do not want to be is a carrier for those malware. So installing an anti-virus should be done only for the occasional health scan and to maybe scan new files as you get them.

I have Googled around for a decent, free, linux based anti-virus and have found the following:

1. ClamAV (URL http://www.clamav.net/lang/en/) or check with Synaptics
   
2. avast! (URL http://www.avast.com/linux-home-edition)
   
3. AVG (URL http://free.avg.com/gb-en/download.prd-afl)
   
4. F-Prot (URL http://www.f-prot.com/products/home_use/linux/)

I ended up using AVG for myself since it was a CLI only installer (yes, no GUI) and didn't require me to register to use it (as you can see, I only tested one product). In any case, if you want to give it a try, these are the free ones I could find. Feel free to let me know what you think of this post or the product if you tried them.

You can also check the Ubuntu page on anti-viruses here.

What anti-virus?

One cool thing about being a Ubuntu user the last four years is the fact that I do not need to install an anti-virus program into my computer. This only goes to show that linux is superior in design to Windoze. This saves me money (don't need to buy) and time (computer works faster). :)