On Tuesday 09 February 2010 12:18, Mark Wallace wrote: > I put Windows back into one system so that my son could play some old > games from his sister's youth and he picked up the same virus twice in > four weeks. I won't let him go online in Windows. > > I wonder if you are more vulnerable to windows viruses if you duel boot > (because you are reaching across the partitions to get things) or if you > use Wine (it might run a windows virus)
Getting files from Windows onto Linux across partitions isn't much of a problem /unless/ you're /executing/ programs that were copied over. Wine will in fact run some Windows malware, and I've had it happen on a machine I support. As much as I like VirtualBox, some Windows games do not run well within a Windows VM under it. For instance running MD2K under VirtualBox runs the 3D part just fine, but the mouse response is so bad that the game is completely unplayable -- there's a large "dead zone" that is immediately followed by oversensitivity, making it very difficult to keep the mouse pointer within the game anywhere except the edges of the screen. So... you can try VirtualBox and hopefully you have better luck than I had, but don't count on it. My recommendation would be to dual-boot and to remove networking support from Windows so that your son /cannot/ go online within it. This is not a recommendation I like making, as there is a natural tendency to want to do "everything" within one OS if possible. -- Chris Chris Knadle [email protected] _______________________________________________ Mid-Hudson Valley Linux Users Group http://mhvlug.org http://mhvlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mhvlug Upcoming Meetings (6pm - 8pm) MHVLS Auditorium Mar 3 - Sahana and 7 Years of MHVLUG Celebration Apr 7 - Nagios May 5 - Android
