How Safe is Linux?

This sounds like a stupid question... but please bear with me... are there good firewalls/anti virus packages available for Linux systems... I currently run Norton stuff and that seems to keep my system quite clean and protected...

You don't really need an antivirus program for Linux. The only real viruses for Linux as worms, and the best way to protect against them is simply to see to it that you're running the latest version of all vulnarable software.
As for firewalls, Linux has built-in support for it which is far more sophisticated than anything you'll ever find to Windows. Of course, that might be hard to use and set up, so you might want one of those programs that set it up for you, like RedHat's lokkit.

In short linux is a rock =)

Q: How safe is linux?
A: just as (un/)safe as you want it :)
You can make you own system a Forthress in the middle of a black whole, or a "Hack me, Hack me please"-neon-sign spanning the galaxy. It's just a question of how much one know about security and how much time one wants to spend.

certainly a default linux instalation is far more secure than a default windows instalation and a good admin can make his linux system far more secure than a good windows admin could. equaly if you are messing around without really understanding the concequences then you could make your system allmost as unsecure as a windows system. but really security for linux users is really not a big issue for anyone exept admins maintaining a company network or webserver. you could have no firewall/av detection software at all in linux and on top of that you could run older software and still none of the viruses you get in your emaail will affect you and infact you would ,even so, be very unlucky indeed to get hacked or a worm.

your system could be totaly insecure and broadcasting this to the world at large every time you connect to the net but you would still probably not get hacked for the simple reason that most people know only ways to hack windows machines/software and methods for doing this are well established.

its only as secure as u want it and have time for. u could learn programing and re-make kernle. or u could just leave it as is.

I don't know why anyone would want to rewrite the linux kernel. That would be a massive project.

hehe i was gonna say that.. i think he means recompile

When I was working this summer, I was literally amazed at how many Windows technicians said that they could tweak Windows better than Linux. Is it wrong that I wanted to F-5 (Brock Lesnar's signature move) all of them?

To see what an F-5 is, please check out:
http://www.dolda2000.com/~bpark/f5dreamer.gif

Well, a large majority of the issues with linux typically relate to the server side. This means that they are hosting services such as Web hosting, mail servers, etc. Let me put it to ya this way, the Internet is primarily a Unix/Linux network with some NT participation. That should tell you something.

I believe a user mentioned the software firewalls in Linux, I know Mandrake's is actually pretty good (Maybe ICF in XP could take a few notes). Linux is set up to be secure by default, use common sense though.. Use root wisely and download the updates from your distro's site and you'll be a happy camper. Linux makes a great client side personal computer (i.e. not hosing websites and mail servers).

Most importantly, educate yourself.. Education is the biggest proponent of a secure OS.