"I hate to admit this, but I wasn't worried," said Forrest Gaston, a consultant who is managing the project for the Indianapolis-based agency. And despite heavy Internet usage by students, Gaston's optimism has been borne out thus far. Desktop security "hasn't been an issue," he said.

Linux's relative immunity to viruses, spyware, worms and other malware has long been one of the open-source operating system's key attractions. Exhibitors at the Desktop Linux Summit 2006 in San Diego this week will certainly tout a lack of security threats as a big selling point.

"There are almost no viruses for Linux. Certainly, I've never seen one," said Tom Welch, chief technology officer at Linspire Inc., a San Diego-based desktop Linux company.

In a recent blog entry, Jeffrey Jaffe, Novell Inc.'s chief technology officer, wrote that since joining Novell late last year and switching from Windows to Linux on the desktop, viruses have become "things of the past" for him.

Even companies hawking Linux antivirus products acknowledge that the operating system doesn't suffer from many security woes at this point. "Our product is more used to filtering Windows viruses than actual Linux viruses," said Ron O'Brien, an analyst at Sophos PLC, a security firm in Abingdon, England.