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