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Focused on AVG 7.1 Free for Linux

Lukas Zapletal, top Czech Linux specialist and the editor-in-chief of the LinuxEXPRES magazine focused on Linux and OpenSource technologies, has let us take a peep at the new version of the free Linux antivirus application.

You might be somewhat surprised by the article's title. Indeed, GRISOFT’s free AVG Anti-Virus for Linux Workstations has recently been released for download. And, you might consider this an absurd nonsense: there are no viruses on Linux! But there are; and if you take into account the current Linux success you may as well predict there will be more of them. There is a well-known proverb: "Don't put off till tomorrow what you can do today."

However, being ready for the Linux virus attack to come is not the only advantage that AVG Free for Linux has to offer. I bet you get quite a lot of spam and infected e-mail messages in you mailbox. Sure, these cannot harm the Linux operated machine but there is no need to delete them manually if a properly configured e-mail client with AVG Anti-Virus installed can take care of this automatically!

I did not encounter any problems downloading and installing the [AVG for] Mandriva Linux 2006 RPM package. The AVG antivirus homepage also offers installation packages for Red Hat, and SUSE. An icon has been added to my menu: when I click on it, a new dialog resembling a Windows GUI appears. I must say that it is a very intuitive interface. The first button launches the on-demand test, the second one allows the user to review the test results, and the third button performs an update.

The configuration options are also rather extensive although there are not as many settings as there are in the AVG for Windows version. An elaborate user manual is available for download on the program’s homepage, so you will not get lost. You can activate the heuristic analysis, binary decompression run time, archive scanning, and "smart" file type recognition (though not recognition based on file extensions). I was extremely pleased with the options available for the scanning / updating schedules - the program edits the user's cron chart. (Cron is a program, or more precisely a daemon, that makes sure the specified tasks are run at the scheduled time. This daemon is a part of almost all Linux systems. Many periodically run tasks, e.g. regular system updates, file system indexing, etc. can be launched automatically using this functionality.)

The entire user interface is programmed in Python using GTK, and - just like in the antivirus core itself - the dependencies are kept to a minimum. That means you will have no problems installing the program on non-supported systems as well. For instance, within about two hours I succeeded in running all [of AVG's] services on Gentoo Linux. If you use Gentoo or other distributions, you might be interested in this webpage where I have collected my knowledge and experience together with the AVG daemon starting script.

However, a major benefit of the AVG Free for Linux version consists in the incremental update that can be launched directly from the interface, either automatically or using a command line. AVG Free for Linux Edition also includes a console version that you can use to write your own customized scripts, or to easily integrate this antivirus solution into your e-mail client.

The following experiment has proven the speed of AVG Free for Linux Edition's core: On the testing machine (Pentium 3, 256 MB), while in single-user mode, I scanned the /usr/lib folder (approximately 400 MB of mostly binary files). For the purposes of this test, I also used the well-known open-source ClamAV antivirus that has been popular especially for being distributed for free within the commercial sphere as well. And I was not surprised by the results: AVG Anti-Virus was 30-40% faster. Of course, this may not be a big difference, but it just might be a significant consideration when deciding whether or not you perform an upgrade of a fully-loaded company e-mail server.

Another benefit of this antivirus program is the presence of a daemon that can be used for on-access scanning. Speaking in Windows slang, we would probably call this function a "resident scanner" or a "background utility". The daemon is installed, configured, and launched automatically; and if you have the Dazuko module in the core, it starts running immediately. When running a local e-mail server on your station, the daemon can also be employed for incoming e-mail message scanning using the Perl Amavisd program.

AVG Free for Linux Edition is available for free to home users and is intended for private and non-commercial use on a single computer only. However, for a reasonable price the commercial version offers the options of running more daemons depending on the server's load. You can decide whether you want to be charged by the number of e-mail boxes or by the number of servers. Subsequently, as your company is growing you can change the licensing model, which I find highly useful.

The pricing is quite reasonable. A two-year license for 10 mailboxes is available for USD 195; the overall antivirus defense for a company running one e-mail server is available for USD 890. Last but not least - another benefit of AVG Anti-Virus for Linux is the fact that the price also includes the on-access scanner that can be used for file servers.

Lukas Zapletal, top Czech Linux specialist and the editor-in-chief of the LinuxEXPRES magazine focused on Linux and OpenSource technologies, has let us take a peep at the new version of the free Linux antivirus application.