i am duel booting w/ win ME and Mandrake 8.2 and i have norton professional 2003 on my ME partition and do not currently have a scanner for my linux partition. i heard that linux is pretty much immune to viruses but i was wondering if i should go ahead a get a virus scnanner? what scanner do you recommend? thanx in advance, -sk

Just my opinion - You do not generally need a vir scanner for Linux. -The vast majority of virii target Win and cannot even run on a Linux box. -on Linux most of your protection should come from having a good firewall setup. This is your 1st line of defense. -a firewall won't cover POP e-mail delivered virus payloads, but again few Linux e-mail clients are capable of being a usable target (Outlook is a popular target). -a wall may also not close holes in chat clients. This needs to be considered. HTH, Guy

you probably don't need one, but if you're asking this, you probably also don't know how to set up a firewall... Search for "iptables tutorial" if you want to learn... Oskar Andresson has a great one. Probably the best idea is keep up-to-date with security announcements. http://www.linux-mandrake.com/en/security/mdk-updates.php3?dis=8.2 Subscribe to the security mailing list. The nice thing about holes in OSS is that (generally) it's patched FAST. No http://www.pivx.com/larholm/unpatched/ style stuff. Therefore, if you keep up-to-date on your patches, you'll be immune to the few viruses out there for nix. Also, don't install servers you don't need. If you don't want to host a web site, don't install apache. If you don't need to share files over Win network, don't install samba, if you don't need to be your own DNS, don't install BIND, etc.

forgot- if you still want AV software, http://www.sophos.com

Well there are not to many viruses yet (and its not virii its viruses http://www.perl.com/language/misc/virus.html) But I have heard that Linux viruses are growing exponantialy (Ex: Slapper and all its variants). *nix viruses have already passed Win viruses...

I use sophos at work....I often get files/emails sent to me from other users on the network to check for viruses just in case.

If you or using samba for file sharing with windows clients you will need a virus scanner sophos works great on linux