AAAHH HA AHAA HA!!!!!!
HA HA HA !!! OH HO HO HO HO HO!!!!
AHUH! AHUH! AAAAAHHH HA HA HA HA HA HA HAAA!!
"linux has terrible antivirus support!" OH HO HO HO HO HO!!!!!
Actually, it is almost impossible for a virus to do much damage to a unix machine unless it is very badly set up, and you would need to set it up badly deliberately, and know what you were doing too, unlike in windows, where you get this bad setup free of charge with every default install, and in some cases it is impossible to fix it so it's secure. Also, because no unix machines ever are set up this badly, you will very rarely find a virus that tries to exploit huge gaping security holes, that quite frankly are never there. It is incredibly rare to find a virus for a unix system *at all*.
While it is *completely* impossible for a virus or trojan to affect system files in unix (again, excepting it being set up badly as above), you may have a point about the virtual machines.
wine would not be affected by most if not all viruses and so on, as it does not actually have any windows codes or files, but translates windows calls into linux/unix calls.
VMWare on the other hand allows you to install a real copy of windows in a fake machine, so i imagine that if your real copy of windows within VMWare got a virus, it would affect whatever software you had running within the virtual machine. There is no way in hell it could ever affect anything outside of the VMWare sphere of existence though, and while it might fuck up your windows, VMWare will come through without a scratch, and so will linux. Having said that though, VMWare lets you install any PC software on it, it's just a virtual machine, so install windows in VMWare, then install antivirus software on top, simple. And free, if you use AVG Antivirus 6.0...
Who told you that rubbish about linux and antivirus support? the reason you don't see much antivirus programs for linux is because it is totally unneccesary. The only way you would ever need an antivirus program for a unix computer is if you were connected to a windows network. Those machines could go down like flies from a virus that passed through your unix box without it even noticing.
[ June 05, 2002: Message edited by: Calum ]
