Remove Message Popup on Boot

mcdef · 09-10-2009, 09:52 AM

My friend did something to my computer that causes a small message box to pop up anytime I reboot. Where should I look to find the message and remove it.

I have tried:

find . | xargs cat | grep "Message Text"

to no avail

help would be greatly appreciated

schneidz · 09-10-2009, 09:56 AM

the likely culprit would most likely be a line added to ~/.bashrc or ~/.profile or ~.bash_profile .

does it do it for all users ? hopefully they didnt mess with /etc/rc.d scripts.

also:

Code:

 find . -exec grep "Message Text" '{}' \;

if its not too inappropriate can you paste what the pop-up says ?

catkin · 09-10-2009, 09:56 AM

Please give more details about "a small message box to pop up"

j_jerry · 09-10-2009, 09:58 AM

Please post the message, and when is it coming, after login??

schneidz · 09-10-2009, 10:02 AM

^ probably a prank using zenity or gdialog. like "you're a dumbass. click 'ok' to continue" .

well thats what my friends do (i need new friends).

i92guboj · 09-10-2009, 10:03 AM

If it's a graphical popup, post a screenshot, it's better than any abstract description.

Also, please, test if this happens with a newly created user. That is vital to see if whatever he changed is an user-setting or a system-wide one. That will help us limit the scope from where it could be coming.

mcdef · 09-10-2009, 10:05 AM

i don't know how descriptive i can be about the message itself. It is something he typed in. Its just a small message box in the upper left hand corner that i have to click OK button to get through.

I did not see anything in the ~/.bashrc file. In the ~/.profile file there is a line at the bottom that says "mesg n"

Also, It is only my user

catkin · 09-10-2009, 10:10 AM

You said it happened "anytime I reboot" but "in the upper left hand corner" suggests a GUI and that would be when you log in ... ?

GrapefruiTgirl · 09-10-2009, 10:13 AM

2 more suggestions:

1: something in an [autostart] folder for your users desktop login session.
or
2: the sort of little xterm that appears when your desktop environment is borked and the desktop environment can't start.

As mentioned, a screenshot would be great

Sasha

mcdef · 09-10-2009, 10:13 AM

it pops up just before i can log in

i92guboj · 09-10-2009, 10:16 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by mcdef

it pops up just before i can log in

Quote:

Also, It is only my user

Those two are incompatible statements. Is is *after* you have logged in as your user, or is it *before* you can login? Both can't be true.

mcdef · 09-10-2009, 10:18 AM

sorry let me clarify.

he only had access to my user not root. It pops up before the log in screen on boot

i92guboj · 09-10-2009, 10:23 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by mcdef

sorry let me clarify.

he only had access to my user not root. It pops up before the log in screen on boot

Strange, because your user shouldn't have that kind of access. More than probably he used sudo su to gain root privileges or sudo alone to do whatever he was doing.

If it happens before you login, it's not local to your user (unless your distro is doing something really funny). It's not quite clear to me where exactly are you seeing it. It could be the login screen or it could be something in the framebuffer splashscreen while the kernel or init are still booting.

Marko Hyvärinen · 09-11-2009, 06:26 AM

why not asking your "friend" ?

Too embaressd or?....

Marko

i92guboj · 09-11-2009, 06:36 AM

If the popup has some legible text, you might find it by grep'ing your whole system, it will take quite some time though.

Code:

grep -r -i "the popup text" /*

That is, as long as it's not an image, but proper text. If the text is embedded into an image it won't work.