I have an external storage medium containing viruses originating from my Windows box. If I plug it into my Linux box, what will happen? What if I use Wine?

Question

anonymous · Answer

It might be possible for viruses to run with Wine although all i have heard about linux is its security. Anyways why risk it? Clean it first.

anonymous · Answer

why do you grow viruses there?

jagatuba · Answer

Likely nothing will happen. Linux works nothing like Windows and even Wine is merely an emulator as opposed to being a full-on Windows OS or Windows VM. A Windows virus will do nothing to your Linux installation. It may mess with Wine, but that would be the extent of the damage and I don't even think it would mess with that much if at all. Wine has gone though many, MANY iterations just to get standard software to operate correctly on it, and this is with the intention of getting that software to work on it. More likely than not the virus won't even run in Wine.

And @Tomas.A I have two Windows XP VMs that I frequently infect with viruses to see what happens and to see if I can fix it. It's actually quite fun.

anonymous · Answer

cant those viruses from virtual machine crawl to yours?

jagatuba · Answer

Nah. I got them lock down tight. They connect only to the Internet. No network connection to the host.