[Wine]Virus Question

[Joris Huizer]

½Bî¶ §ºµth£Ñ½ wrote:
> Hi, the Wine program seems great.  I run Eudora in WinXP, and this 
> program will enable me to run Eudora in Fedora 3 and use the same 
> mailboxes via Captive-NTFS - and so I will always have my email up-to-date.
> 
> I have one big concern: viruses.  Is it possible for me to get infected 
> with a virus using Wine?  If I got infected, how well could the virus 
> infect my system?  Meaning, I plan to install Captive-NTFS , so if I 
> have a virus, could it write to relevent Windows files etc. on my 
> mounted NTFS partition?  If I get a virus, how easy would it be to clean 
> it - could I just run like AVG or something and that would take care of it?
> 
> (I'm still getting used to Linux!)
> 
> Thanks a ton!!

It really depends - if the virus uses a kernel issue changes are small 
it'll work on Wine (as the change of having exactly the same mistake in 
both windows kernel code and wine code is, well, small ;)) - but if it's 
using bugs of the program being run than it might work just the same as 
on a real windows environment.
Using a fake windows directory is encouraged as Wine might otherwise 
have troubled with windows registeries being filled with unknown trash; 
also by using one or multiple fake windows directories, you can avoid 
loosing any real information caused by virus activity - then, if you got 
infected, you'd just remove the infected directories and grab the fresh copy