Avast antivirus on Ubuntu

Installation problems

Installed Avast antivirus on Ubuntu, well actually Kubuntu 64-bit, via a deb package from the Avast website: avast4workstation_1.3.0-2_i386.deb.

For some reason the wrapper-script.sh file couldn’t locate the binaries and was giving an error at line 178 like so:

/usr/bin/avastgui: 178: /usr/lib/avast4workstation/bin/avastgui: not found

Turns out that all I needed to do was install ia32-libs, which can be done with

sudo apt-get install ia32-libs

at the command line, although I used aptitude.

Now run

The app can now be run from the command line or via the K-menu / Krunner by executing “avast” or “avastgui”.

Or perhaps not …

You may also need to alter a system setting like so:

sudo sysctl -w kernel.shmmax=128000000

Which can be made permanent by either adding to the wrapper-script.sh script or by adding to a startup script like so:

echo kernel.shmmax = 128000000|sudo tee -a /etc/sysctl.conf

Once I’d installed ia32-libs and the associated dependencies and set this system setting I was able to update avast, which took several minutes without feedback, and run the application both at the command line and from the gui.

Happy hacking!