antivirus worth it?

[Viper8896]

i was just wandering if everybody here thinks if i is worth installing an av on my system how effective these are and do they actully prevent linux viruses or just a port of a windows av

[oz]

I've never run a Linux AV app in my 7 years of using Linux, but that's not to say you shouldn't. It really all depends on the computer user's habits and what the machine is being used for, at least in my opinion.

[Zelmo]

My 2¢:

A month or two ago, Slashdot carried the story of the first virus written for Linux. A day or two later, they had comments from Linus Torvalds to the effect that the virus depended on the Linux kernel behaving a certain way, which it didn't, so the virus was unable to do anything. That's the only Linux virus I've heard of. Granted, more will probably crop up eventually, but at the moment there's just nothing for a virus scanner to find.

When I put Mepis on my laptop, I noticed that it came with KlamAV, so I took the anti-virus for a test drive just to see what it said. It started listing bunches of "problem" files. Mind you, I had just installed the OS, and didn't have the network up yet. So either the install CD came with a slew of viruses, or the anti-virus was generating a ton of false positives. I'm guessing it was the latter.

Long story short, I'd wait until there's a need for a Linux anti-virus, and the software has been tuned to meet that need.

[DThor]

http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/lin...-security.html

DT