Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Two front ends for Clamav

Clamav is the most popular free anti virus program for Linux environment.( Of course it scans for widows virus) However, clam is a command line utility and you need some skills for manipulating is properly. There are several graphical front ends for clam av which can make your life easy. The most popular among them are clamtk and Klamav.

Clamtk
Clakmtk uses Perl-tk  for GUI. It is available for several distributions. On ubuntu you can install it as

$ sudo apt-get install clamtk

On Karmic it showed up as virus scanner under Applications ->system tools.

On launching it , the following screen pops up


You can select for  single user settings or system wide settings and then click save. The main window of clamtk will pop . You can choose  either your home folder  , a file or a specific directory for scanning.



  When the scan is completed a list of detected  viruses will be shown. You can select individual  infections and right click on them to delete or quarantine.

  ( My usb stick had nearly 100 infections. I wanted to select them all for deletion  . How ever I could not find such  an option.)

Klamav
  Klamav is a KDE  based front end to clamav. You can install it with
$ sudo apt-get install klamav
It showed up as Applications->System tools ->klamav. On launching it, I
got the following screens.


                     Press Next

You can configure  clamav command line and Quarantine location.

You will get the above  screen. You can check the folders to be scanned.


            Scanning in progress.


            Final result of scan.

You can select all infections and quarantine them.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

I was wondering if you have installed Klamav on a gnome desktop and if so is there any conflict.

Anonymous said...

Both Clamtk and KlamAV are examples of how bad most Linux software is.

Both have retarded GUI interfaces (untested on users) and are backwards.

ClamAV has earned high ratings for virus detection, so someone should do a good GUI interface?

Anonymous said...

@RWDub: you can install, though I do not see the meaning of doing so, as long as you have a Gtk front-end, clamtk.
Klamav will install some qt libraries and dependencies from KDE, resulting a mixed desktop environment.
The graphical front-ends reduce the speed of main component, clamav, so I advise the use of terminal:
clamscan -r --bell