Note I am not Anti-Russian, in fact I am addicted to news on RT.com (according to my friends anyway).
I installed altlinux-p7-sysv-tde-20160312-x86_64.iso trinity version thinking about switching over to it:
I played with it for a couple of days and decided it would be more work than I wanted to do, to customize it to what I wanted, which was too bad since I liked it.
I then deleted it and installed the live Q4OS version. I liked it too but did not want to be forced to use LVM. While testing Q4OS I noticed that the large blue box with two Russian words in it thatI first saw after install ALT_Linux, was still appearing on the screen--right after the power came on.
I thought maybe that during the live install it was put on the boot section or the disk, or possibly some where else on the hard drive that didn't get erased, so I used dd to zero out those sections as well as the entire drive, and created a new partition with gparted. Then the first time I restarted the computer it was gone. But when I pushed the reset button, it was there again and after that all power on events caused it to reappear.
About this time I started getting nervous, and wanted to know where was this image stored on my computer and what activated it at startup.
So. I pulled the hard drive and started the computer up with no usb or hard drive attached and still got the logo. This meant that the image was not on the hard drive. So I thought it might be in the volatile ram on the BIOS chip. I used the jumpers to clear the BIOS chip and just for good measure removed the chip and let it sit for 30 minutes. Nothing changed when I put it back in and started up the computer, the image still appeared.
The only thing I can think of that would permit this scenario to work, would be if they burned the image into the non-volatile part of the BIOS chip.
I don't think they are hacking my computer, I think they are just showing off. But the idea of someone burning code onto my BIOS chip, or hiding it somewhere I can't find it--doesn't make me happy. They could have put anything, including a back door access to my computer in it.
Has anyone else had or noticed this problem when installing ALT_Linux versions? And does anyone have any other ideas as to what I could test or other things to try that might remove it?
Keith
I installed altlinux-p7-sysv-tde-20160312-x86_64.iso trinity version thinking about switching over to it:
I played with it for a couple of days and decided it would be more work than I wanted to do, to customize it to what I wanted, which was too bad since I liked it.
I then deleted it and installed the live Q4OS version. I liked it too but did not want to be forced to use LVM. While testing Q4OS I noticed that the large blue box with two Russian words in it thatI first saw after install ALT_Linux, was still appearing on the screen--right after the power came on.
I thought maybe that during the live install it was put on the boot section or the disk, or possibly some where else on the hard drive that didn't get erased, so I used dd to zero out those sections as well as the entire drive, and created a new partition with gparted. Then the first time I restarted the computer it was gone. But when I pushed the reset button, it was there again and after that all power on events caused it to reappear.
About this time I started getting nervous, and wanted to know where was this image stored on my computer and what activated it at startup.
So. I pulled the hard drive and started the computer up with no usb or hard drive attached and still got the logo. This meant that the image was not on the hard drive. So I thought it might be in the volatile ram on the BIOS chip. I used the jumpers to clear the BIOS chip and just for good measure removed the chip and let it sit for 30 minutes. Nothing changed when I put it back in and started up the computer, the image still appeared.
The only thing I can think of that would permit this scenario to work, would be if they burned the image into the non-volatile part of the BIOS chip.
I don't think they are hacking my computer, I think they are just showing off. But the idea of someone burning code onto my BIOS chip, or hiding it somewhere I can't find it--doesn't make me happy. They could have put anything, including a back door access to my computer in it.
Has anyone else had or noticed this problem when installing ALT_Linux versions? And does anyone have any other ideas as to what I could test or other things to try that might remove it?
Keith
