It certainly sounds like you have a BIOS password set. It could (very, very
rarely) have happened spontaneously by a power surge but usually it is done
by a human being. When I taught computer tech some naughty students used to
put BIOS passwords on the computers. It was a game for them, but a real
inconvenience for us until I found Kill CMOS.

There are two solutions. You can take the case off and find the jumper to
clear the CMOS settings. There are several variations but usually you either
put a jumper on or remove it and it flushes everything back to the default
settings - including no password. A more elegant solution is to use a
utility such as "KillCMOS", which easily fits on a floppy disk. It is
bootable and contains code that resets the BIOS to it's defaults - again
with no password. You can find it here
http://majorgeeks.com/download.php?det=2969 . You will need another computer
to make a bootable DOS boot disk and copy the killcmos file onto it. Then
just insert the diskette, start the computer and watch it happen.

If by any chance the computer in question has no floppy drive it should work
just as well if you prepare a bootable CD or DVD with the same tiny (8 Kb)
file on it. One caution. Any Anti-virus software that is any good will tell
you this little programme is a virus. It's not, but it does what some
viruses do, which is what you want in this case. Keep it on a floppy disk,
because your computer's anti-virus software may "clean" it and render it
useless.

It certainly sounds like you have a BIOS password set. It could (very, very
rarely) have happened spontaneously by a power surge but usually it is done
by a human being. When I taught computer tech some naughty students used to
put BIOS passwords on the computers. It was a game for them, but a real
inconvenience for us until I found Kill CMOS.

There are two solutions. You can take the case off and find the jumper to
clear the CMOS settings. There are several variations but usually you either
put a jumper on or remove it and it flushes everything back to the default
settings - including no password. A more elegant solution is to use a
utility such as "KillCMOS", which easily fits on a floppy disk. It is
bootable and contains code that resets the BIOS to it's defaults - again
with no password. You can find it here
http://majorgeeks.com/download.php?det=2969 . You will need another computer
to make a bootable DOS boot disk and copy the killcmos file onto it. Then
just insert the diskette, start the computer and watch it happen.

If by any chance the computer in question has no floppy drive it should work
just as well if you prepare a bootable CD or DVD with the same tiny (8 Kb)
file on it. One caution. Any Anti-virus software that is any good will tell
you this little programme is a virus. It's not, but it does what some
viruses do, which is what you want in this case. Keep it on a floppy disk,
because your computer's anti-virus software may "clean" it and render it
useless.

I think I have a bios virus on my brand new motherboard even though I was
running Ubuntu Linux (I'm a bit of an activist for environmental and political
causes which doesn't win friends in spooky places, if you know what I mean.)
Basically I suspect it was a denial of service attack on me from the MIB who
work for the Oiligarch Banksters as I call them.

A. How can I get my motherboard back short of reflashing my bios?

B. My reinstall of Ubuntu just puts another copy of Ubuntu on top of the first
one. How can I get root control and reset all this?

C. Even on my first installs of Ubuntu, I never seem to be recognized as root.
Why is that and how can I fix that?

Hope these are new questions or ones that you want to answer again.

Re-flashing a BIOS is not a normal thing to do and if the BIOS is really
corrupted you probably can't do it anyway as the BIOS is necessary to start
the computer. Why do you think you have a BIOS virus; is there some
behaviour that leads you to suspect that, or are you just naturally
paranoid? ;-)

You have root control in effect every time you install. There are always at
least 2 options - take over whole drive or install side by side with what's
there already. A manual install isn't that difficult but you do need a basic
knowledge of he Linux file structure.

There is no "root" user by default in Ubuntu. It uses sudo before the
command to do root things, including sudo bash. It prompts for a password,
which is always yours, the one you logged in with. Exit or Control-D takes
you back to regular user status.

There are root kits for Linux. Maybe you just have a root kit.

You should consider using a VM to access the internet to isolate any danger
to the VM. You clone the VM and then if it is corrupted you just delete the
old VM and start a new one from the clone.

If he's actually installed software from some unknown source, it could
put hooks into the system, but it's not very likely. There are a lot of
other things I'd suspect first.

You could search Google for the following:

clear cmos toshiba 135-S2246

or

clear cmos toshiba a135-S2246

which gave me this:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=clear+cmos+toshiba+135-S2246&btnG=Search

at which I found this:

www.s2services.com/bioscmospasswordfreeware.htm

and a whole slew of other hits dealing with this problem.

Pull out the motherboard battery, let sit for a few seconds, replace the
battery. The BIOS settings will return to default.

I had also been researching on the web and
getting conflicting information.

Found a Toshiba service bulletin stating this was a bug in their BIOS
and could get a free repair at authorized service center. Took it in and
picked it up 3 hours later with updated BIOS that fixed the password
problem.

I think I've been running 8.1 Ubuntu. It doesn't want to
install over itself. So last time I had to install Mepis Linux over it and then
install it over Mepis. A real pain in the... Anyway, does 10.? install over
itself so I can reinstall after it gets corrupted and knocks me off the wireless
again?

Is there any utility that can take over deep down and track all users so I can
tell if I've been hijacked and someone is running an invisible server
underneath? Don't know what the preferred terms are. Making them up to try and
express what I think keeps happening to me. I think some malware is installing
itself at a low level then taking over my wireless and dumping huge data that
then gets me kicked off the wireless network and my PC ID blacklisted so I can't
get back on it.

the VM sounds like a solution but I don't know what a VM is Virtual
something I suspect. Need a little more handholding to understand and implement
next time. I'm pretty green in Linux though been using it awhile now. I have
graduated from a Super User of MS crap to a novice normal user of Linux and MS
crap over the years.

thanks for the info on the sudo vs. root. What else do you guys suggest
I do?

If I can use 8.1 so I don't have to borrow another computer to download another
CD that would be good. I really don't want to have to flash my bios if I can
help it.

I'm not sure what sort of problems you are having with the reinstall,
but you can install ubuntu over any existing image. Choose manual
partitioning and it will let you do whatever want.

When you speak of ubuntu 8.1 my first thought is that there was no
January 2008 release of ubuntu. I'm thinking you might have gotten that
confused with 8.10, the October 2008 release.

8.10 will work but is quite dated, and will be unsupported in a few
months. So, if you can't download and burn an iso image, then I'd
encourage you to just get an ubuntu 10.04 CD, as there are LUGs handing
them out for free, and online stores sell them for a nominal price.

By default the ubuntu install is pretty darn secure. If I had any such
doubts about the low level character of the machine, I'd start fresh:
wipe the disk, flash the BIOS, then do a clean install of ubuntu 10.04.

Wireless connections can be insecure, particularly if you're sending
unencrypted passwords and other information across, so try to use only
strong encryption, and use https connections for your sensitive
information, if available. Always assume there is someone listening on
the wire, so make it hard for them to get anything.

The idea behind running in a VM (virtual machine) is to isolate problems. As
far as the person on the other end would know is when they are looking at
your computer they would see the VM and any contamination would be limited
to the virtual machine and not your computer. VMs are used for many
purposes. They are easy to setup, copy, move, etc. When you connect to the
internet you do it through the VM (client) and not your usual browser on
your real computer (host).

You need an application that creates VMs. I use Virtualbox from
virtualbox.org. It is also available in the repositories, but that version
has fewer features (such as no usb). It is better to get it from Virtualbox.
It is free either way. Then you use an install CD or ISO of an operating
system. Instead of installing the OS to your hard drive, you install it to a
virtual machine and this creates a virtual computer within your computer.

To use a VM you need a fairly recent computer with a decent processor and
some RAM. My four year old single core HP with 4 GBs of RAM is more than
enough to run XP in a VM, so we aren't talking about having an expensive
computer. You give the VM some of your HD space, some RAM and video memory
and install. It is quite easy and even fun. You should also consider closing
all ports except those which you need through a decent firewall. All distros
include hardening utilities that you can install above and beyond the usual,
plus there are some distributions that are dedicated to running securely.

Perhaps you could provide some additional details if you are still
interesred in finding a resolution to this. For item A, take us through the
symptoms that your machine is exhibiting to make you think your motboard has a
virus. For item b,what exactly do you mean? Overwriting your existing
instalation sounds like the right behavior and what you want to happen when you
are reinstalling.

Item c, as someone may have mentioned can be obtained with sudo su from a
terminal, but not a good idea if your still learning your way around...