Hello all. In a bid to "spice" up my 4 year old laptop I replaced the 1gb of memory with 2gb and tonight... I took the plunge... and installed Ubuntu Linux on it. Bear in mind I am NOT a techie really, replacing the RAM and a DVD drive on our old desktop was the most advanced thing I had done, But tonight I wiped the laptop clean of all Microsoft and installed Ubuntu Linux, My god its fantastic. It runs so quickly and everything is so clear. Its perfect for what I use the PC for (net surfing, email, PS3 media server, downloading). I'd highly reccomend it if youve got an old PC that needs spicing up its a bit daunting at first but really worth it. Do I need an anti-virus?

Think it's meant to be ok without an anti-virus, but would wait for further confirmation.

I must agree though, much better on old machines, revived my old laptop as well. Despite the common image, it's not hard to use for that sort of thing, it's just more technical stuff where things get confusing, and where the terninal comes in, otherwise it is a lot better than Windows for the older machine IMO.

You should be fine. If you want piece of mind install clam AV as that can scan for windows nasties etc on stuff you download before you move it over to your windows machines.

With a decent firewall you shouldn't need to bother with an AV program.

ClamAV is a bit bare-bone - no graphic interface with the basic install and I must confess I didn't even understood how to get it to start :P so uninstalled. There are graphic user interfaces to add, though (e.g. ClamTk)

There are linux versions of Avira and AVG too.

I use it on all my old machines. I have ununtu running on my photo frame laptop and it works a treat on the 733mhz cpu and 256mb Ram!

It is a bit more complicated when installing some programs or trying to get some things to work how you want but it is a bit more flexible in a lot of ways.

Suppose just for general web browsing etc on an older laptop it is perfect!

Phil

With a decent firewall you shouldn't need to bother with an AV program.

ClamAV is a bit bare-bone - no graphic interface with the basic install and I must confess I didn't even understood how to get it to start :P so uninstalled. There are graphic user interfaces to add, though (e.g. ClamTk)

There are linux versions of Avira and AVG too.

All clam really does is scan on request. That's fine because you're downloading files for other machines, so you just download them, scan daily and night and delete any that are infected.

You can them copy them to the windows PC with a knowledge that most obvious risks will have been taken care of.

I have installed Mint on a couple of my laptops and love it

Most web sites are hosted on Linux, and they get infected.

To say you dont need any AV isnt entirely true.

Most web sites are hosted on Linux, and they get infected.

To say you dont need any AV isnt entirely true.

Technically incorrect.

The website doesn't get infected by a virus, somebody will find an exploit which gains them permissions to do stuff they shouldn't be permitted to.

In 99.9% of these cases, the cracked sites have been cracked because they have not been kept up to date with security updates.

I can't think of a single self propagating GNU/Linux virus out there. TO be fair this is helped by the many different distros and variations on Linux.