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Hi, having been around a while in different news sits, especially ones with a comments section I see a lot of "If Linux was as popular as Windows we as desktop Linux users would have a lot of viruses too. I would like to try and debunk this myth. Here is why it's almost impossible to have a Linux virus on Linux.

That's not to say there are no viruses for linux, just there are none in the wild, all have been concepts in a lab.

1. any executable that is downloaded from the web will not run without user intervention. first you would have to download it.

2. you would have to flip the executable flag to actually run it.

3 If what you have downloaded is actually harmful the most damage it would do is damage /home not the actual OS as the file would have no permission to write anywhere else.

4 Yes there are Antivirus for linux, ClamAV for one, most if not all Linux fellows use this to scan for Windows virus's whilst sending attachments to other people.

5. Most Linux users keep to what is in the repositories of their Distro.

6. No-one will run a Linux as root, unless brain damaged. There is no reason what so ever to run as root, except for installing, or troubleshooting, and usually that's done for minutes at a time.

Which brings me to a bugbear of mine in Linux, especially Ubuntu and spin offs and that's sudo. sudo to me is a bad idea, here is why (I am hoping someone can correct me on this) in a *buntu install you enter just one password, for argument sake I use password1. So I need to do something that needs root privledge say apt-get. So I open a terminal and type "sudo apt-get install me-tv" it asks for my password which is my user password.

Now this is the crux, if happy hacker manages to hack my user account, they found my username "present"(for argument sake) and the found my user password "password1" what is to stop them using sudo to mess my machine up?

This is why I use su, with su you need 2 separate passwords, (I personally have a simplish one for user and a longer and very different one for root (remote root login is disabled). so if they do get in under my user name/password they still can't gain access to the system itself, only my $home. Which is why my $home is backed up, ya never know.

Anyway, this has been playing on my mind and I thought I'd share.