Best Practices for 2008 - Linux and other Operating Systems
On January 1st, a post entitled Best Practices - Internet Safety for 2008 shared concepts related to staying secure. While many of the concepts apply to ANY operating system, some feedback was received that this was mostly Windows oriented. While I agree there's less malware circulating for open system based OS's (UNIX, Linux, Solaris, BSD), security is a process that must be employed in ANY environment.
In a former company, I used the corporate Red Hat versions for a few years. I'm even anxious to build a secondary PC at home in the future to stay more educated on this environment, with one of the distributions in the future.
Based on this feedback, I want to be fair and balanced 
Below are few ideas for Linux users to stay safer in 2008:
Some best practices for LINUX and other UNIX derived operating systems
- Firewall (hardware firewalls are a good choice or you might configure IPtables to set firewall rules)
- AV protection (while in-the-wild specimens are few and far between, either a real-time or command line scan only) and most of the other list of tools in OP as desired
- Setup and use more limited non-root user accounts as the primary login area to protect the root environment
- Keep the kernel and other components up-to-date and keep all other software updated (e.g., Open Office, Firefox, email system, etc)
- Turn off all programs/services that you don't plan to use (e.g., SendMail is one popular service often manipulated
- Install ssh and tcpd (provides more secure and encrypted communications for remote access)
These links may provide advice and best practices to better protect these OS's:
Linux Security - Best Practice Links
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=linux+security+best+practices
http://cio.uiowa.edu/itsecurity/bestprac/linux.shtml
http://www.linux.com/feature/47100
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/spaces/linuxsecurity
http://www.itc.virginia.edu/unixsys/sec/
Apple OS X Security - Best Practice Links
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=apple+system+x+best+practices
http://developer.apple.com/internet/security/securityintro.html
http://www.osxfaq.com/
http://its.unm.edu/security/dsecurity.pdf