Notes on Red Star OS 3.0 | Hacker News Reader

Notes on Red Star OS 3.0

richardg867.wordpress.com

101 pointsadamnemecek57 comments

As a KDE developer, it's a bizarre feeling to see our code at work there.

I'm very curious to have a closer look at the scope and quality of their modifications, and what they indicate about how the Red Star developers interact with the community. Some of their mods may be derived from popular third-party patches, which would require active exposure to the venues where they're shared.

If you trace this, I'd be curious if this was modified directly by North Korea, or if they hired the work out.

Nationalism and security would probably mandate the former, but I'd imagine even the North Korean government could throw more than enough money at this problem to buy a high quality customized version.

You might find this interesting -

" Computer Science in the DPRK A view into technology on the other side of the world "

http://media.ccc.de/browse/congress/2014/31c3_-_6253_-_en_-_...

EDIT - ok, it's already linked in the article. It is interesting.

Running strings on the binaries of the built-in apps reveals some Korean names and *.edu.kp email addresses - which, of course, are not available on the public internet.

Interesting how even China, given its wealth, has given up on building its own OS and chip infrastructure. The much touted Red Flag linux running the Godson/Loongson chip never really materialized. They're using Microsoft products on Intel/AMD instead.

Is a national OS such a non-trivial problem? Interesting how autocratic regimes and their citizens often attack the US on every level, but are happily running US developed software/processors and using US discovered patents on a very important level. I suspect this is further proof that autocracies simply can't compete with capitalistic democracies regardless of the propaganda they believe.

I think this is more about economic policy and less about government representation. It's hard to get more capitalistic cutthroat than the OS or high-end semiconductor industries.

And I'd imagine a majority of it is a consequence of the head start. If China had started development of both even in 1981, and sheltered their internal market from our product -- well, it probably would have turned out a lot like the Soviets, viz inability to maintain computational parity. But they would have something more complex.

Good luck developing an entire ecosystem now (ARM aside, but that's mostly due to Wintel's blindless on where mobile was going).

Also, hilarious side point: what happens if an autocratic regime customizes Linux/*BSD and ignores their open source licensing obligations?

Nothing?

Open source licenses are enforced by functioning copyright laws. When a country hasn't agreed to the Berne Convention, they don't have any legal requirement to follow the open source license.

If it's legal to copy music in the company, it's likely also legal to copy open-source software.

OS and chip infrastructure are two different beasts. Chip infrastructure much more difficult to recreate, even the Intel's best competitors can't keep up with their process tech and design capabilities.

But OS and software? I'm surprised the Chinese govt hasn't just cloned Ubuntu and reskinned it, then mandated the entire country convert to it. I suppose the main problem is, as with everywhere else, too much required enterprise software that is Windows-only.

Bingo—I bet they have a lot of money sunk into Windows. They'd have to replace that software before investing in linux on the OS front.

> Interesting how even China, given its wealth, has given up on building its own OS and chip infrastructure.

I wouldn't say that. I would say that the Chinese Government has allowed the free market to take over this task. Take a look at http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/chinese-arm-soc-mediatek... all high quality ARM SOCs from Chinese suppliers.

Likewise, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIUI is a fork of Android that reportedly runs faster than Google's stock shell. (I have seen an old version in action on Android 2.2, it was fast, really fast, from what I have read newer versions are just as zippy) Xiaomi has also built up a complete separate (successful!) ecosystem outside Google's, something that Amazon has tried and failed to do.

In another few years you are going to have a Chinese controlled mobile OS being used throughout the Asia Pacific region, running on hardware designed by Chinese companies.

ARM isn't Chinese IP. Its not theirs, its licensed from ARM Holdings which is a UK company.

Android is a American open source project. That's not chinese either and they sure as hell can't just get off Windows for Android, yet, if ever. They need a usable desktop OS.

No one is doubting their ability to copy and refine in a limited fashion, but their homegrown attempts have all been massive failures.

> ARM isn't Chinese IP. Its not theirs, its licensed from ARM Holdings which is a UK company.

The CPU is only one very small part of a chipset. The overall SoC is far more important.

And of course any company that has an Architectural Licence just has to make something that is compatible with ARM. (Although I don't see any of the lower cost SoC manufactures doing this anytime soon!)

That article is off-base; MediaTek, which is probably the most advanced of those listed, is Taiwanese.

Great to see this getting played with. In addition to these notes, there's apparently a custom kernel module doing security stuff that was found on twitter.

I mostly find this interesting for how much work went into it. Priorities can be really weird sometimes.

I posted the slides from my CCC talk: https://wills.co.tt/bitbucket/dprk/#/ I'm also happy to answer questions about redstar & related technology.

The CCC talk comes highly recommended. It's mostly about the time he spent teaching CS in a pyongyang academy for elite kids. He demos some of the official android apps too.

Crazy, the default language is 'ko'. I thought only South Koreans used that?

http://marcrogers.org/2014/12/18/why-the-sony-hack-is-unlike...

They still speak the same language, although in 60 years of separation the vocabulary has diverged a bit.

Earlier discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8766411

Motherboard Vice has a general article about Red Star 3.0's release:

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/you-can-now-install-the-nor...

My first thought: I'd want to install it just to get the wallpapers. Maybe some intrepid soul will do that and release the wallpapers as a separate distribution.

The Vice article has a few more contextual details, such as how Red Star was rarely distributed for personal use, and that Windows 7 was still popular among students according to the American teacher who first spotted Red Star.

One of the comments in the article had a link to the wallpapers http://s000.tinyupload.com/index.php?file_id=706209438639911...

Some of those are surreal. Is it me, or did they photoshop farm machinery into their fields?

They're all photo-illustrations or outright painting/drawings.

Imgur album if you just want to look at them without downloading the .zip: https://imgur.com/a/OU4y6

Huh; according to that article, the thing ships with Windows 3.0. Guess the legacy software's still gotta work.

It's not Windows 3.0. It's version 3.0 of a wine wrapper.

Ah, I see. Only slightly less interesting, then :)

So, for someone unversed in North Korea, what does this mean exactly? The entire country uses this distro exclusively? Or just by government workers?

There's going to be an entire generation out there who've only ever used Linux?

Will Scott's talk (and this blogpost) says that nobody really uses Red Star OS in DPRK.

Are they all on Windows?

Yes. Windows XP mostly, Windows 7 otherwise.

I'm not particularly familiar with how many people use Red Star OS, but as a small point to help you evaluate advice you may get, those who _are_ versed on "North Korea" call it "the DPRK."

Oh no! I've been listening to people calling it the DPRK instead this whole time! ;)

Ah! I read your comment a few times before I even saw the transposition. Yes, I just meant the official name of the country as opposed to the slang some Americans use.

"slang some Americans use"? C'mon.

"Corée du Nord" and "Corea del Norte" each have millions of search results (in each case, about 10x as many as the formal name). The BBC says "North Korea".

I try to speak to only what I know, I don't know French.

Why assert the term is American-only slang, then?

I didn't say that, I just said that Americans use it. Anyway, this isn't particularly interesting.

Surely someone versed on North Korea and interested in sharing their knowledge with the general public in somewhere like the US would use the term "North Korea" in order to be understood?

Sometimes, but if that's a concern, they'll often use it the first time, mention the actual name is the DPRK, and then go from there.

Calling someone by their chosen name is one of the most human things you can do. Dale Carnegie and all that. The United State's dehumanization of the citizens of the DRPK begins with calling them by the name we prefer rather than the name they've chosen for themselves.

Meh. We call the Russian Federation "Russia", the French Republic "France", the Kingdom of Morocco "Morocco", and the "Republic of Korea" South Korea. It's hardly unique, and no one else seems to mind.

Eh, I don't think it needs that much over-explanation. We also commonly call the ROK "South Korea", and the ROC "Taiwan". They're both allies, but we still typically don't use their actual names in anything but formal settings. Going back to the Cold War, we used geographical terms for both East Germany and West Germany, which weren't in either of their names. I don't think this was out of a desire to dehumanize Germans, but rather because referring to a divided country as if it were not divided, using their official names "Federal Republic of Germany" and "German Democratic Republic" (which both claimed to be The Real Germany), is unwieldy bureaucratese.

(It's also not U.S.- or English-specific; you do the same thing in all these cases in Danish. Except for formal documents, it's Nordkorea and Sydkorea, not Den Demokratiske Folkerepublik Korea / DDFK or Republikken Korea / RK.)

We don't have imperialist intentions with any of those countries, nor do we consider them enemies. The ROK and the DRPK are both shorter than North/South Korea.

Anyway, words are hard.

North Korea's citizens have never been given a choice about this or any matter. As for me, "Democratic" and "People" in the regime's name for the country is a travesty and I will never use it. Out of respect for the millions of lives the Kim family have ruined during their decades of tyranny and mismanagement.

EDIT: Also, we call it "Nordkorea" in Sweden. Take that, Kim!

If the worst thing that happens to the people of North Korea is that we call their country "North Korea" instead of "DPRK", I think they'll be fine. (Obviously, that's not the worst thing that happens to people there.)

The nation is neither democratic, nor is it for "the people", nor is it a republic - but instead a totalitarian dictatorship run for the convenience of one man and his favored associates. But it is Korean. One out of four isn't too bad, I guess.

So should we always say USA? US, by your conventions, is wrong as well (never mind the now even worse America!). Hope you never say China when really you should say the People's Republic of China!

I can't tell if you're just trolling or actually care. Either way it's fairly dickish behavior that's totally unnecessary and doesn't advance the discussion.

Here's a wiki link for anyone unfamiliar with this glorious distro https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Star_OS

Does anyone know what the window manager is? I think it might the same one as the one Elementary OS uses, but it looks slightly different.

It's KDE. Albeit not the standard KDE desktop.

I wonder why they used such an old version of Firefox?

I haven't used it but it looks slower than common linux distros on Will Scott's talk.

he runs it in a vm i think.

I know, but I have better performance on vm. May be hardware limits of vm was too low.

I was running it on a super low powered chromebook, which was the main problem.

Ironically, I haven't played with red star desktop 3.0 that much. I really need to find time to mess around with it properly.

It's like rain on a wedding day!

There is a surprising lack of Engrish in the included apps.

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