(old)Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

Hello
I am using only puppy 5.1.2, no windows at all except wine. In the days of xp, a slow internet connection, 0.5m and an old laptop, p4 1.2, avg or avira sapped the performance of the pc.
Is this safe to do any financial transactions without antivirus.
Thanks
number77

1. I'm no super expert, but....

2. I've never heard of any Puppy_Linux that was hacked or infected.
Though there was 1 occasion when streaming a video at a webpage, that some strange things began to happen.
Something was attempting to mount and access the filesystem on the "live" Puppy CD-RW.
I put a stop to that, removed the CD, but my pupsave file had been affected [infected?]
So I deleted that pupsave, and replaced it with a backup copy, and apparently the problem was then gone.
Puppy made it possible for me to detect and deal with that quite effectively.

3. I have installed the Avast! Antivirus on-demand scanner.
Only ever use it to scan my Win2000Pro partition contents.
Never felt the need to scan any of my pupsave files.
The files on the "live" Puppy optical disks are not corruptible.

3. For security when online banking...
What I like to do is:
(a) Run a banking-dedicated session of my favourite Puppy [Lupu-526]...
That is set up so it is possible to [choose to] NOT SAVE THE SESSION.
[Let me know if you want me to tell you how this is done]
How would it get infected if only used to access the banking website?

(b) It would be better if a particular pupsave was kept [on a Flash Drive?] for use only for online banking purposes.
Used to do that, but don't bother any more.

As Sylvnder also say. Keep two savefiles or two different puppies.

one on a CD that you only do banking on and no savefile then the regular on CD DVD or USB flash or frugal on hdd. But maybe don't do banking on them.

that way the risk is minimized. if you search around there are two different AV that can be used on puppy. XFprot is one of them. The other I forgot name of.

I have not used it latest year and on puppy never but who knows maybe I am full of trojans and not knowing it.

And I am a true pessimist. Usually the AV them only know of a virus or trojan some days after it has done what it needed to be done so them always come days too late.
But running wine all the time is not so good.

I have one puppy with wine and one without so only boot into wine when I need it.

Thanks m8s, that reassures me quite a bit and I liked the idea of two puppies with wine on only one not the banking one.
Will have to look into installing two puppies.
Thanks
thyristor44