clamav and freshclam update failures

[ridenotwalk]

I ran into the same problem and this is what I did and it worked for me
I'll put a couple of caveats on it though so YMMV;
I am a relatively new user to Linux so my knowledge/experience is way lower than most and I may be leading you up the garden path
I still use some vocabulary that is more related to windoze but it should make sense
I did this on Linux Mint 19.3, not LL so some things may be different - I wanted to try LM on my laptop just to see what I think.
I am running LM on a 128Gb USB stick so am essentially dual booting Win10/LM at the moment
I used the GUI for some things as I'm not a super confident user of the Terminal yet.

These are the steps I followed

I used timeshift to create a new restore point just in case I stuffed something up

I did a complete remove of clamav using terminal -

Code:

sudo apt purge clamav

I used the file manager, logged on as root, to find and delete all files/directories related to clamav. I did not delete any that were in the timeshift directories

I did a new install of clamav via terminal -

sudo apt install clamav

  during this process I got recommended other installs so added those. In the end it looked like this -

Code:

sudo apt install clamav clamav-daemon clamav-docs libclamunrar9 daemon clamdscan

Once installed I rebooted the laptop

I ran

Code:

sudo freashclam

and got the expected errors (locked by another process, etc)

I removed the logfile using

Code:

sudo rm /var/log/clamav/freshclam.log

Note I did not use -rf

I ran

Code:

sudo freshclam

again to have it time out

Using the file manager, logged in as root, I found and edited the freshclam.conf file changing ConnectTimeout to 300 and RecieveTimeout to 300. I also changed Checks to 6 but that's me, you don't have to do this.
The idea behind changing the timeouts was due to the awsomely great and fantastic internet we get here in Oz, I figured it was taking too long to download the DB's and freshclam times out for me.

I ran

Code:

sudo freshclam

again and the DB finished downloading and passed checks

Moments ago I ran

Code:

sudo freshclam

and got

Code:

Sun Mar  8 12:22:47 2020 -> ClamAV update process started at Sun Mar  8 12:22:47 2020
Sun Mar  8 12:22:47 2020 -> daily.cvd database is up to date (version: 25744, sigs: 2210896, f-level: 63, builder: raynman)
Sun Mar  8 12:22:47 2020 -> main.cvd database is up to date (version: 59, sigs: 4564902, f-level: 60, builder: sigmgr)
Sun Mar  8 12:22:47 2020 -> bytecode.cvd database is up to date (version: 331, sigs: 94, f-level: 63, builder: anvilleg)