[Wolves] Wolves Digest, Vol 298, Issue 8-Jenette

Sun Jul 5 23:30:40 UTC 2009

You haven't seen how ugly we are...

> Anyway more
> seriously is there anyone who could tell me how to make the update
> manager stop updating the same 91 updates all by itself!

Not really without seeing what's happening. If you use apt-get on the
command line there are 2 steps to go through. The first gets the latest
list of software packages available and the next installs any updates
for what you already have installed.

Linux separates users for security, you have normal users like you or I
who have restricted access to the system for safety and you have the
root user, who is all powerful and can do anything to the system. As
normal users don't have full access to do anything they choose on a
system, you can temporarily run a command as root by starting it with
the sudo command, so the 2 commands I was talking about are:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

As I said, the first one refreshes the list of available software and
the second installs any newer versions of what you already have installed.

Try those 2 commands in a terminal and if it doesn't work, copy whatever
it says and paste it into an email to the mailing list and we'll see if
we can work out why it's not working.

> Also can anyone
> explain how clamv actually does anything!

ClamAV isn't like a Windows style AV engine in so much that it isn't
constantly running in the background and therefore it doesn't do the
on-access style scanning of files as you open them which is probably why
it isn't working the way you think it should. ClamAV is normally either
run manually to scan a particular file or directory, or it is glued into
a mail server application to scan emails for viruses.

To scan a file manually, try the following:

clamscan filename

of course swap the word 'filename' with the name of the file to scan.
Alternatively, to scan a directory try the following:

clamscan -r ~

The ~ symbol means your user's home directory. Every user has their own
home directory and it is similar to My Documents under Windows. If your
username is jenette, your home directory would be /home/jenette but the
~ is like a shortcut that means the same thing. You could just as easily
typed:

clamscan -r /home/jenette

or for some other directory:

clamscan -r directoryname

The -r means to do it recursively, which means scan every file in every
directory which is underneath the directory you specified. In this case
you told it to scan everything underneath your /home/jenette.

Does that make sense? If not, just ask.

In any case, there isn't any real need to run an AV scanner under Linux
unless you are using it to protect Windows users. There aren't really
any real Linux viruses in the same way that there are for Windows.
That's not to say that Linux is bullet proof, but there just aren't the
same threats to Linux as there are for Windows and Windows viruses don't
work under Linux. If you wanted to scan files under Linux before you
open them under Windows, just to be safe, then that makes sense, or as I
said before, if you were running a mail server or a file server for
Windows users then that would make sense too, but for your average Linux
desktop system, there's really no need. Admittedly that might not always
be the case but it is at the moment.

You don't need to defragment your hard disk under Linux either.
Anti-virus and disk defragging are pretty common things that Windows
users have to think about that Linux users don't.

Linux can seem pretty complicated and confusing at the beginning, but
only because you are used to something different. However, Linux is far
better at telling you what went wrong than Windows as pretty much
everything is logged under the /var/log/ directory.

In any case, you're in quite a unique position compared to those of us
who have been around a while, you get to start at the beginning and see
all the things that should be easy or obvious, which we are used to
ignoring or working around without thinking about it. It would be
interesting to hear what you find difficult.

Regards,

Adam Sweet

- --

http://blog.adamsweet.org/

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