Quote:I spend a lot of time online, and am uncomfortable leaving my machine up and running without firewalls, and virus protectors. I liked Zonealarm and AVG for the functions, along with CyberHawk for active monitoring. But none of those exist for Ubuntu. Any suggestions for what I can use?
Micahd
Linux security is in many ways quite different to how you must secure a Windows machine. In general, when working on a non-server machine:
Firewall
Ubuntu 9.04, which you mentioned you used in your other post, ships with a firewall called ufw that is switched on by default. It is quite easy to configure; you do have to open up terminal, but it really is nice and straightforward. There's some good basic background on ufw at
this Ubuntu Wiki page.
You can easily set Ubuntu firewall to block all incoming access by default by running this at the Terminal (just press Enter after each command; you'll be asked for your password the first time):
Code:
sudo ufw default deny
sudo ufw disable
sudo ufw enable
(We do disable/enable afterwards just to stop and restart the firewall with the new rules enabled).
Anti-Virus
While running in Linux, it is extremely difficult to get infected with viruses. You certainly can't run any Windows viruses, in the same way that you can't run any other Windows software! Unless you were using virtual machines, or something like Wine, you simply can't run any Windows software at all -- including the nasty stuff.
Viruses and other malware written specifically for Linux are generally few and far between. You also usually have to be much more explicit about wanting to install a piece of software as well, it's not made so easy you can just click Next, Next, Next without understanding what you are doing.
Having said that, if you still do desire anti-virus protection, ClamAV is a good open source scanner. If you go to
Applications >
Add/Remove Software in Ubuntu, and search for
clamav, it will show up in the list and you can simply tick and click Apply to install it.