A while ago I documented my concerns with the dreaded "Nimda" virus, and my decision to abandon Windows in favour of Linux because of it. As it turns out, Nimda wasn't such a big issue at the time. Some of my fellow computing honours students even scorned my concerns. I was therefore somewhat gratified when all their Windows boxen got the virus and had to be disinfected.

Still, I'm very glad that I migrated when I did, because the virus situation has only become worse in the meantime. Just this morning I found two copies of what appears to be the W32/Badtrans-B virus in my inbox, sent to me because the virus found my email address in someone's web cache. If I'd so much as viewed them with Outlook Express v5, my computer would have been infected. It's true that Microsoft have released a patch to fix the security hole exploited by this virus (which, incidentally, is one of the holes exploited by Nimda), but I've decided that I'm better off using something that's actually moderately secure by design. Microsoft's attitude to security seems to be that it's a complete and utter non-concern until the world is overrun by viruses.

What I am in fact using to view my mail now is KMail 1.3.1, which is part of KDE 2.2.1, which is in turn a part of the Mandrake 8.1 distribution of Linux and other free software. I had all sorts of problems with my initial migration away from my Windows box, but in retrospect these all seem to have been hardware problems, not Linux problems or anything like that. One motherboard has decided to do something nasty to PCI or interrupts, such that the network card no longer notices all the time when packets arrive. Another hard drive seems to have been randomly corrupting data here and there. My opinions of ASUS and Quantum have gone down as a result of this, and I've wasted days trying to isolate the faults. Still, now that my hardware is actually somewhat stable, I have no particular desire to revert to Windows.

Like I say, I'm glad I moved to Linux before the Nimda-derivates became a real problem. Now all I have to do is migrate some of the people who call me for technical support to Linux. This should be relatively simple: as their machines get infected, they can bring them to me for fixing. The fix will be a permanent one involving the use of Linux. Box number one has arrived already, and, believe it or not, the owner is moderately keen on the Linux idea.