Gabriel's shared items

Sunday, April 22, 2007

Hit by virus, and considering converting to linux.

Ok, this is it. End of the road for microsoft.

Got hit by a virus sent as a link by a friend over msn. Link is http://24347.herasunmedaxuke.com/6/918 DONT TRY IT!!!

it downloaded the file "the winners game.exe"

Dont know why i was so off guard to the point of running the executable file. Maybe cos he was also a mathmo and i thought it's one of his creations. But since then, my com has been getting increasingly laggy. Ran system restore, but it's still not working properly.

And I realised that I haven't gotten myself any antivirus programs on this computer.

Now I'm thinking of the main functions of this computer...

I use it mainly for the internet, msn, skype, and email.

As well as maintain websites, all of which will not be a problem on linux... I connect to the server using filezilla.

I need a pdf reader, which shouldnt be too difficult to replace on a linuxbox, and I'm already using openoffice, and gimp.

I also would need a music player, to replace itunes, one which will play my m4a files.

And, find out if the OS would be competible with all the usb devices I am using - my camera, palm; and all the cards - sound, webcam. And the dvd player, which I have never used.

Also, if I am intending to game, I'd need to find out how the games would be competible with the version of linux i'm using.

Main games would be dota, and C&C3, if i get it during the holidays.

Come to think of it, maybe I shouldnt wipe out the whole OS, but install linux on a seperate partition. See if that's possible.

2 comments:

Shawn Tan said...

Instructions and answers to your questions:

http://sybreon.blogspot.com/2007/04/if-you-wish-to-convert-to-linux.html

If you're serious on switching, now is the best time as you need to re-install your OS anyway. If you're not interested in switching but interested in testing it out, best to just run it under a virtual machine instead of a separate partition.

Anonymous said...

Just one or two comments. For dealing with the virus as it is, the computing service have a CD somewhere with all the sensible anti-virus stuff on, it would be worthwhile getting hold of this regardless of what you do.

Yes, slackware might give you a better understanding in the long term, but for nice dependency management etc, as well as the fact it "Just Works", ubuntu is probably more worthwhile.

If you do go with Ubuntu (or most of the other popular distributions), the Computing service have a mirror of the repository (this contains all the software packaged for you to download & install):
http://www-uxsup.csx.cam.ac.uk/pub/linux/
It is worth editing your /etc/sources.list.

The other choice you have to make is if you want your distribution to be GNOME based (e.g. Ubuntu), KDE based (e.g. Kubuntu - you can quite easily install both KDE & GNOME on (K)ubuntu at any time anyway), or another desktop environment. Roughly speaking, the KDE desktop is more similar to Windows (in style only now), GNOME to Mac. Since I'm highly biased towards KDE, I won't comment on which choice to make, you could always try out a live CD/DVD first anyway, or google/wikipedia for more information.

Some info on dual booting:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WindowsDualBoot
Although I'm sure that information is quite easy to find.

Robert Crowston
--www.srcf.ucam.org/~rec53