HelpMeClayton:

“About a year ago, my friend set me up with a netbook with Linux Mint on it for my mother.  It does all she needs to do with browsing the internet, watching videos, reading email.

Lately she has been complaining that her machine has a virus.  What do I use to clean a virus off Linux Mint?”

The fact of the matter is that Linux itself is not going to get a virus or malware, at least nothing is in the wild as of this writing.  However, the video watching and web browsing can expose her machine to cross-platform malware.  Adobe Flash and Java are the two main targets here.  To the non-techie user, it just feels like their machine has a virus.

So What do I do?

Make sure you install any updates to Flash or Java as soon as you find out about them.  Google Chrome will update itself as soon as it needs to.  For other browsers see the following page on WikiHow.

If you still want to do SOMETHING to make you feel better about the virus free status of your machine, you can use the free antivirus CLAMAV.  Look for it in your app store.  The thing is….you might get false positives instead of detecting any real problems, so you are better off just checking to make sure you are up to date, and then leaning back and enjoying computing