[Wine]Re: Virus Question

[Emmanuel Charpentier]

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.

Beware : there still ain't a free (as in speech) ntfs filesystem, and 
I'm a bit wary of growing dependant of a closed-source kernel module...

> I have one big concern: viruses.  Is it possible for me to get infected 
> with a virus using Wine? 

Someone posted recently (either here or on 
news:comp.emulators.ms-windows.wine) that he had been able to get a 
Windows virus running on his/her wine installation. So it is possible

>                           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?

That depends on the (non-existent) goodwill of the virus and the way 
your NT|XP partition is configuured. if your Windows ID has no "System 
administrator" privilege and Captive-NTFS is correctly written, then a 
virus could be content with f*cking up royally your user data. OTOH, if 
you're running under a privileged account OR there is a security hole in 
  Captive-NTFS, your whole NTFS patition is (potential) dogmeat...

>                          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?

[ Diaclaimer : No direct experience or knowledge ! ]

I strongly doubt that your vanilla Windows antivirus would run on wine : 
these programs try to trap a lot of "interesting" system and library 
calls and check them. I doubt that such traps can be installed the same 
way on Windows and Wine.

May I suggest to reverse your setup, and to install an ext2/3 filesystem 
driver on your Windows partition and to install your shared 
(Windows|Linux) fileson such a partition, safely readable/writable from 
Linux and Windows (as far as ona can do something safely on Windows, of 
course...).

A much better way indeed is to install an IMAP server on another 
"service" machine, which can be a very small machine (your junior son's 
leftover may be fine) : leave your mail *here* and use it transparently 
from any machine that happens to be abe to reach this miniserver. Said 
miniserver can also be used as a firewall, as a print server, etc ... 
Quite useful in many ways...

Complement : use Linux apps for as many tasks as possible, Wine for as 
much as possible, and revert to Windows if and only if a serious effort 
does not lead to a working Linux solution.

For now, the only thing I can't do under Linux is voice dictation in 
French (I tried hard, got working solutions in English, but not in 
French). I need wine mainly for opening Access databases (immediately 
porting the data to Postgres...), to check Access forms and Word complex 
page layouts. All the rest is done under Linux apps, with one pesky 
exception : damb IE-only Web forms (thank you, lazy|dummy Web jocks !), 
which force me to launch IE6. All the rest is done with Linux apps, 
which give better results 90-95% of thez times.

Now, if I could convince Dragon Naturally speaking to install correctly 
under wine ...

Hope this helps.

					Emmanuel Charpentier