Antivirus in Linux Distros

Debian

The Debian packages are maintained by Stephen Gran. ClamAV has been officially included in the Debian distribution starting from the sarge release. Run apt-cache search clamav to find the name of the packages available for installation.
Unofficial packages are available through the Debian volatile project (AMD64 arch is also supported). They are usually more recent than official ones and they are maintained by Stephen Gran too, so they follow the same layout as the official ones. Here is a blurb from the Debian volatile project home page:
‘’Some packages aim at fast moving targets like spam filtering and virus scanning, and even via using updated virus patterns, this doesn’t really work for the full time of a stable release.
The main issue of volatile is to allow system administrators to update their systems in a nice, consistent way without getting the drawbacks of using unstable, even without getting the drawback for the selected packages.’‘
If you are running Lenny, we recommend that you use one of the Debian volatile repositories to keep your ClamAV installation updated on your system.
Always choose the mirror closest to you.
Edit /etc/apt/sources.list and add a line like this to it:
deb http://volatile.debian.org/debian-volatile lenny/volatile main contrib non-free
Then run apt-get update; apt-get install clamav
If you need clamd, you may also want to run apt-get install clamav-daemon
If you are running squeeze (Debian 6.0) or newer use:
deb http://ftp.XX.debian.org/debian squeeze-updates main contrib non-free
Replace XX with your country code.

Ubuntu

The Ubuntu packages are maintained by Ubuntu MOTU Developers. ClamAV has been officially included in the Ubuntu distribution since the first Ubuntu release. Run apt-cache search clamav to find the name of the packages available for installation.
There are two classes of clamav packages available for Ubuntu users:
The released set (release, *-updates, and *-security) are patched for security updates. Following extensive testing of clamav and the packages that use it in the backports repository, they may be updated to a newer version. These are official Ubuntu packages and supported by community developers.
The Ubuntu backports repository will contain the newest clamav version that has been at least lightly tested to work with that version. These packages can be installed by enabling the backports repository in your system. These are official Ubuntu packages and supported by community developers.

SUSE

ClamAV is included in the openSUSE distribution and in Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise products. The packages are maintained by Reinhard Max.
RPMs of new ClamAV versions for existing SUSE products are provided through the respective online update channels.
As these packages have to go through QA, it usually takes some days from a new ClamAV source release to the appearance of these “official” RPMs. For those who want or need the new version earlier and can dispense with the QA, the latest state of the packages is available from the security project in the openSUSE Build Service.
To use these packages, pick the subdirectory for your SUSE version from http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/security (use the _update variant for openSUSE), add it to your installation as another repository using YaST or zypper and give it a higher priority (lower number) than the repository that delivers the official updates.

RedHat and Fedora

A very good repository is maintained by Dag Wieers dag at wieers*com:
http://packages.sw.be/clamav/
Make sure to read the FAQ before attempting to install the package.

Mandriva

Official Mandriva packages for cooker and supported updates (2006.0 and newer) are maintained by Oden Erikkson. For updates, use the software package manager or urpmi:
urpmi.update—update
urpmi—update—auto clamd
Unofficial packages for current and several older Mandriva distributions are maintained by Bill Randle and are available from his web server.

Gentoo

ClamAV is available in portage under /usr/portage/app-antivirus/clamav. If you run:
emerge clamav
you will install the version of ClamAV that Gentoo considers stable.

Pardus

Official packages are maintained by Ali Erdinc Koroglu
You can install ClamAV directly from the Package Manager or run:
sudo pisi it clamav

Posted in: Red Hat