is wine virus free?

[arunkumar413]

recently i installed wine on my system and i wanted to know if wine is virus free.I got this doubt because wine runs windows programs on Linux and most of the windows programs are prone to viruses.does running a virus infected windows program under wine pose any problem to the Linux

[binbash]

it wont be a problem

[Mud.Knee.Havoc]

recently i installed wine on my system and i wanted to know if wine is virus free.I got this doubt because wine runs windows programs on Linux and most of the windows programs are prone to viruses.does running a virus infected windows program under wine pose any problem to the Linux

Check out this thread. It seems that it is possible to mess stuff up because a virus has access to all directories that are visible with wine (which includes /). You can restrict this access to just ~/.wine by going into winecfg and clicking the harddrives tab.

They say that there's even a virus on wine's application DB that has a platinum rating.

EDIT: Oops, forgot to link to the thread I mentioned. Everything is fixed now.

[Murrquan]

I once saw an article that was talking about running tests with viruses on Wine, and saying that they all crashed or didn't do anything that he couldn't solve by force-quitting the window. He concluded by saying that viruses were an integral part of the Windows computing experience, and that the Wine developers needed to get their act together and improve Linux compatibility with Windows viruses. ^.^

That was a few years ago though, and Wine has been improving. It's probably best not to run any programs you know to be infected, just in case. Isn't there a virus scanner we can use, that scans for Windows viruses? *checks* Yes ... look for ClamAV in Add/Remove. You can use that if you're worried about a particular file's safety. I'm not sure if they keep up with the latest viruses all that well, or that anyone else does. But it's certainly better than nothing.

Hey, maybe you could run AV software in Wine! I wonder if that would work.

[toopi]

I'm sure Window viruses are capable of infecting the files within the bottle and cause chaos in those applications, but that should be the end of it. They shouldn't cross the boundaries of the bottle, however, they may be able to do harm to other Window nodes on the network.

[SunnyRabbiera]

I'm sure Window viruses are capable of infecting the files within the bottle and cause chaos in those applications, but that should be the end of it. They shouldn't cross the boundaries of the bottle, however, they may be able to do harm to other Window nodes on the network.

Yeh it seems to be very localized for the majority of them, all a windows virus can do without root access is close to nothing though and Ubuntu has disabled that in the first place.

[gjoellee]

You can easily get viruses with WINE, but because WINE is not fully Windows the viruses most likely wont have effect. The worst case scenario must be that you have to reinstall WINE. The Wiruses you get is most likely designed for Windows and will not have any effect on your Linux, BSD or Solaris system.

[Meow27]

you can get viruses, and you can screw up ur linux system. just not ur main files


its safe to play it with no viruses

[merlyn]

you can get viruses, and you can screw up ur linux system. just not ur main files

It is possible to install some virii under wine. However you would have to do so manually.

Why? Well I'm glad you asked, and the short answer is that all the usual avenues of infection available on a Windows installation are not present in Wine.

Furthermore WINE is not an emulator, nor is it a virtual machine, the following quote is from the Wine Homepage.

Wine is a translation layer (a program loader) capable of running Windows applications on Linux...

Hence Wine does not provide the level of functionality that an emulator or Windows running in a virtual machine would, sufficient enough for virii to run effectively.

Further reading.

The Wine FAQ: http://wiki.winehq.org/FAQ (in particular points 1.3 & 1.4)
Debunking Wine myths: http://wiki.winehq.org/Debunking_Wine_Myths

There is a really good article regarding attempts to install the most virulent virii in Wine which provides detailed results. Unfortunately I cannot remember where it is but this article is similar.

http://jadmadi.net/blog/2005/01/27/l...ses-with-wine/

In a nutshell the article found that a number of virii would simply not install under Wine, and those that did had limited or no 'success' in functioning at all.

Perhaps there needs to be a sticky with relevant information about the Wine & Windows virii question as this crops up from time to time.

Cheers folks.

[cogadh]

Merlyn and Mud.Knee.Havoc are right on the money. You can get a virus in Wine, but it will not screw up your entire system, just your .wine directory and possibly your user's home directory. If you make the mistake of running Wine with a root account or using sudo, that's a different story. When doing that, Wine and anything run with it has sufficient permissions to access the system files and potentially mess things up royally.