N. Korea launches out-of-date OS | Hacker News Reader

N. Korea launches out-of-date OS

technology.canoe.ca

30 pointsfogus20 comments

So, this isn't exactly breaking news. There was a review posted of it (albeit in Russian) over a month ago. While in Russian, it does have lots of screenshots (http://ashen-rus.livejournal.com/4300.html). I'm not so familiar with KDE to recognize which apps everything are in Korean, but it looks like a pretty standard KDE Linux installation with Firefox, office programs, etc.

Since that blogger got a hold of it, I'm sure it's available outside of North Korea, but I wouldn't want it on my machine. It's noted that it's not completely stable and I'm guessing it doesn't measure up to Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSUSE, or any of the well-polished Linux distributions that we're used to.

It's an interesting idea - that an authoritarian regime would use a freely modifiable OS to create something it probably wants very closed. The question is whether they have the ability to make all their people use it (or if that's their goal at all).

> Since that blogger got a hold of it, I'm sure it's available outside of North Korea,

He is a student in Kim Il-sung University in Pyongyang.

Actually, just about every notable authoritarian regime in the world has a Linux-based OS these days -- Cuba, China, Russia, North Korea, Iran (?)

You would too, if you were worried about using US-based Microsoft's software. No foreign backdoors in open source.

It looks like an up-to-date Linux with KDE 3.5 so the comments about it being a 10-year-old Windows knock-off are amusing, but surely this is just South Korean propaganda that's being mindlessly repeated?

It does say a lot when non-techies view fairly recent linux desktops as "10 year old" software. I guess if they used kde4, the article might be calling it a Vista knockoff.

Actually, I think if you squint KDE 3.5 looks most like Windows XP which, while still wildly popular, is in fact 10-year-old software.

Still seems like propaganda to me though just the clever kind where you say something factually true in a way that most people misinterpret to your benefit.

One other thing I found out while reading about this is that this is a new venture for NK and in fact most computer users (though apparently there aren't that many) are in fact using Windows XP.

I think it just means they don't have the same definition of advanced software as people like us do. I use what I consider to be a cutting-edge Linux OS, but because I use software that's been around forever, like BASH and VIM, I've had several people make comments about my "retro" system.

I'm looking forward to Windows NTFS snapshot service catching up to a 30year old VMS filesystem.

The Linux-based Red Star system borrows heavily from early versions of Microsoft and has knock-off copies of the computer giant’s word processing, spread sheet and power point programmes, the report said.

ha, excellent, OpenOffice is now a knock-off copy of MS Office

Wasn't it always?

yep, it was, but it's sort of sad that most laymen use the derogatory term 'knock-off', since that implies some form of piracy

They built a crippled Linux distro? Didn't China try the same thing with red flag os?

Can we get a copy? I'd love to try this. I'd worry about the North Korean government spying on me though.

If they are in fact phoning home, wouldn't that be interesting to know?

And it seems like the legal repercussions of DoSing the phone-home server would also be minimal. For someone in the US or EU, I mean.

You could always run it under some virtual machine and verify if that's really the case. (with packet captures)

I wonder whether the 'out of date' refers only to the interface conventions etc., or goes right down to the kernel. It does strike me that with NK's dreadful economy, it probably needs to be able to run on oldish hardware. Even if they can circumvent sanctions to get the latest and greatest components for Kim Jong-Il's personal workstation, or their defense department, most of the country is probably saddled with Pentium IIIs or similar.

You can easily run the latest kernel on a Pentium III without issue.

Indeed - I was thinking more of kernel modules using things like SSE2 or the like that I'd just take for granted now. I didn't mean to imply kernel bloat or a lack of backwards compatibility, but rather wondered if the paranoids in NK might be suspicious of current builds.

So their OS is the equivalent of Windows 2000? Is that really as terrible as the article implies?

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