Keith Daniels wrote:

> Note I am not Anti-Russian,  in fact I am addicted to news on RT.com
> (according to my friends anyway).
> 

Same here, but do you read Russian? Because also other nations use the same
alphabet

> 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.
> 

which are the words?

> 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?
> 
why not try debian