F-Prot

(freeware and commercial)

Under Linux, BSD & Solaris you'll find the Linux, and other *nix downloads section. Pick the version you need, decompress and install. Download size was 29.4 megs.

themagicm@mintsamsung:~/downloads$ gzip -d themagicm@mintsamsung:~/downloads$ cd f-prot
themagicm@mintsamsung:~/downloads/f-prot$ sudo ./install-f-prot.pl

You will have to answer a few questions on where to install the manual, scripts etc. Defaults are fine, unless you prefer otherwise. You'll end up with a screen similar to mine along with F-Prot downloading the latest anti-virus definitions if it needs it.

Once its finished downloading the latest antivirus definitions, it will want to install a piece of software which checks for anti-virus updates, the default is fine. It will check every 15 minutes on the hour for updates.

The way you scan for viruses is not via a nice and pretty GUI interface, its all command-line driven.

fpscan- scans system for viruses
fpupdate - updates the antivirus definitions


I'm going to scan my virus test directory to see if F-Prot finds the suspect files..

You'll be prompted for an action if a virus is found. Being that this is a command-line tool, it will take some trial and error along with some setup work in cron if you wanted to automate your scanning process. All in all, this is a very good antivirus package that I would recommend to run in the background, just don't forget to pipe this to a log file and to check it regularly.