Knoppix

[Steve]

Hi folks,

I'm wondering, what's the skinny on viruses, horses, hijackers, etc. while using Knoppix? I'm thinking, seeing that the OS is just in RAM, any nasties that I pick up go poof at shutdown. True?

[Budfred]

Probably mostly true... The average really nasty virus is going to also try to infect your hard drive and probably whatever OS you normally boot into. However, I don't think there are many Linux type viruses out there and I don't know if you can get infected with a Windoze virus through Linux. Overall I am guessing it would be pretty safe, but that is just a guess.

[pentachris]

I found this at the Knoppix FAQ:
A: The general philosophy of KNOPPIX is to allow as little write access as possible. For this reason, existing partitions are either not mounted or only mounted "read only". If you click with your right mouse button on an icon, the "read-only" attribute under item "device" can be un-checked. After this, the partition can be mounted "read-write" (for already mounted partitions, first click on "unmount"!).
Knoppix will try to use any existing swap partition on your hard drive that it can find, but an infected swap partition should be just like infected memory - poof! when you reboot.

[mjc]

Also since it is Linux, you should be safe from Windows malware...if you do d/l any it should *poof* and there isn't all that much Linux stuff around, and in this case, since the config files are not able to be premanently changed a reboot will fix that too.

[Steve]

Thanks guys. That's what I thought but I just wanted to make sure.