It is a very good idea to have an antivirus software on a linux machine IF it has some association with windows machines especially through samba . For example , if you have a ubuntu machine acting as a file server which say shares a folder called music which has read and write access to everybody on your network , ubuntu can be a medium to spread viruses . It by itself will not be affected but it can spread this virus to other windows machines on the network . Like for example when a windows machine accesses the music folder which was modified by another windows machine which is infected by a deadly virus . In that case , when this windows machine access the music folder , it too will get infected . But the ubuntu machine will continue to remain clean. So installing an antivirus software in ubuntu and scanning shared network folders regularly can be very useful . So here's more on that :

Firstly , you need to install AVG antivirus, for this do the following

Step 1 : Go to THIS LINK and download AVG antivirus for linux
Step 2 : Now this file will be in your desktop
Step 3 : Now click on it and click on Install Package



Step 4 : Thats it you have avg installed

HOW TO UPDATE AVG
To update AVG , you need to go to the Terminal and type sudo avgupdate


HOW TO SCAN FILES
To scan files , you need to go to the Terminal and type sudo avgscan directorytoscan , here directorytoscan will be the folder you wish to scan . For example : In my main server i have my secondary hard drive under /media/data which is shared to my network which contains windows machines. So for me to scan this drive i have to type sudo avgscan /media/data . Thats it avg should now scan the whole thing . Here's a demoscreenshot of a scan i made with a test virus on my desktop.



FINAL WORDS
Being command line , AVG has a lot of advantages , you could combine cron with these commands and create a shell script to automatically schedule AVG to scan for viruses at a particular time everyday or everyweek.I think it can be very handy on a windows network!!

9 comments

Carlos Kosloff said... @ July 12, 2009 at 12:49 PM

Hi,

I installed AVG .deb without a problem, screenshots were the same you show.
However, I get this in terminal:

ckosloff@UbuntuMini:~$ sudo avgupdate
[sudo] password for ckosloff:
AVG command line update
Copyright (c) 2009 AVG Technologies CZ

Running update.
Error: Component connection is unavailable.
avgd is not running or is not yet fully initialized.

How can I fix?
AVG offers no support.
Please respond ckosloff@hotmail.com
Thanks.

Prash Babu said... @ July 12, 2009 at 10:48 PM

I think i had the same issue earlier , did you try rebooting?? this starts all the avg processes for sure!!

Carlos Kosloff said... @ July 19, 2009 at 9:26 AM

YES! Rebooting did the trick, thanks.
Now please post the commands to use in the terminal.
AVG offers no instructions at all.
Thanks again.

Carlos Kosloff said... @ July 19, 2009 at 9:32 AM

Disregard, I understand how to use it.
Sorry, THANKS.

Anonymous said... @ August 24, 2009 at 7:08 PM

If there a way to do it without rebooting? I'm trying to execute avg from the live CD

Kunal said... @ November 1, 2010 at 4:45 AM

hello all

if you are running live cd or dont want to restart do the following:

sudo /opt/avg/avg8/etc/init.d/avgd.all start

then

sudo avgupdate

finally, scan using:

sudo avgscan /media/....

Anonymous said... @ February 12, 2011 at 12:10 PM

For this error:
Error: Component connection is unavailable.
avgd is not running or is not yet fully initialized.

Do the following:
sudo /etc/init.d/avgd start
sudo avgupdate
sudo avgscan /media/...

Rajan said... @ April 12, 2012 at 10:18 PM

will this scan delete all the viruses , or disinfect all the files or just scan or what. What is the command to delete all the infected files and without deleting the vital windows files and just disinfect them

Unknown said... @ December 7, 2012 at 10:48 PM

how can i remove Infections found in terminal???

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