Acer's malicious programs

I don't know where to start with this but yesterday I was trying to install VLC player with no success due to the lack of available libraries that it depends on. Then when browsing Acer's suport website I found a package which contains VLC. I thought great! Acer has managed to compile and optomised VLC so that it installs under Linpus.

So I downloaded the zip file and opened it up with Xarchiver. The pdf file says to install it just extract and run the schell script vlc.sh, I did that (bearing in mind I wasn't even logged on as root) and it updated my system at the same time. Little that I knew, when I rebooted nothing worked. The wireless card couldn't be found, the USB ports don't work and the system was more or less cocked up. I couldn't even go on recoveryXP to try and revert to previous settings!!! So today I'm gonna make a recovery USB disk and restore back to factory settings.

This leaves me rather peeved with Acer in that their software has cocked up my system(which is hard to do under Linux unless you have root privileages). Have they managed to create some sort of Linux viruse/malware? :roll:

Oh and the website I got that dodgy linkDO NOT DOWNLOAD AND EXECUTE UNLESS YOU WANT TO VERIFY THAT IT SCREWS UP LINPUS :x )
ftp://ftp.work.acer-euro.com/netbook/as ... vlc.sh.zip

 

I was going to check their package and see what they did, but their download speeds are SLOW. It would have taken over an hour downloading that little package. I hope Acer invests more money in development and bandwidth. A little goes a long way to developing a support community.

 

They need to make sure that their script isn't gonna crap out the settings on Linpus :x Now that I've got a fresh reinstalled Linpus I am gonna backup stuff whilst its still fresh and working so that stuff like this doesn't happen again. Now I've got to reinstall Lyx, Abiword, Gnumeric and QCad to get back to my original settings.