Do I need a firewall and antivirus stuff?

[the lemming]

Hello

Having only played in a Microsoft world I am all too aware of hackers, viruses and spyware.

Now that I have decided to move over to Linux Mint do I need any kind of protection while surfing?

I only ask as I went to a site which tested for vulnrabilities and it got me wondering as I had failed some tests.

Cheers

[NiksaVel]

no, here is why:

http://www.linuxmint.com/wiki/index.php ... e-firewall


and welcome to the free world lemming!

[BlahBlah_X]

You don't need anything, but if you want to be on the super safe side, install a firewall. Just search in synaptic for "firewall" and look at the list.

[NiksaVel]

firestarter for gnome and guarddog for KDE seem to be the most popular solutions - I've used them both and they are super-easy... extremely light no resources.... come to think of it they take up NO resources since they are only GUI frontends for configuring IPtables - which is an integral part of linux
and of course no annoying popups of any kind...

I've tried both and decided I have no use for it.... been using bianca stable since it was released (well ... almost since it was released)

[scorp123]

I only ask as I went to a site which tested for vulnrabilities and it got me wondering as I had failed some tests.

Can you please give more details about this? What site and which test did you fail? You have to be cautious with such sites, especially if they belong to a vendor of anti-virus software and such. Even though you are probably perfectly safe such sites will try to make you believe that you absolutely need their products ...