A Crowded House …

And when I say crowded!

Boy, do I mean crowded!!

Bless, Tim, and his partner, Adele popped over, today; along with Sarah, who had a piccy she wanted me to diddle with!!

Mostly to say ‘Hi’, and because Tim wanted me to show him round some of the wilder parts of the ’net to see if we could rustle up some form of anti-virus, or basic security software for Ubuntu 9.04.

He’d picked up a rather nasty rootkit, on his desktop PC, a few days ago, and thought it’d be sensible to get some sort of protection for the Ubuntu’d laptop!

Sensible move, actually.

Being at the home user end of Mac User’s, I’m very aware that, while there’s not a lot of viruses aimed at OS X, or Ubuntu.

But there’s quite a lot aimed at the various versions of Windoze, doing the rounds.

So using OS X or Ubuntu means, at the very least, means getting hold of some sort of basic protection … if nothing else, it means preventing various bits of malware attached to emails, and passing them on to your Windoze using friends.

So we’ve managed to find a basic bit of kit — called Avast — and installed it on his laptop. (Quite simple to do, even for me; it’s just a case of downloading it from the site, and installing it with Ubuntu’s on-board package manager.)

It was pretty much the same process for installing aMSN.

Something I know that Tim and Adele are very familiar with is good ol’ fashioned Pester Power! Most in the shape of their eldest, Rhiannon.

The one thing Rhiannon missed about having Ubuntu, rather than Windoze, was the lack of what’s called a Chat client; something that’d let her natter to her friends, through MSN’s Messenger service.

So we all did a little bit of hunting around, and found a couple of clients she could use; although looks like the current version of Emesene won’t work with anything other than Karmic Koala …

Hmmm …

But we did manage to find something called aMSN.

Which looks like it could be working out for them! Hopefully, Rhiannon’ll feel confident enough to leave a comment about it!