As some of you might know, I have a strong interest in North Korea. I find the secretive country simply fascinating and I keenly follow anything related to it. Just as when a news story begins "Today, Prince Philip said..." you know it's going to be riveting/hilarious, so too is it when a report begins "Today, North Korea..."
When I visited North Korea a few years back, I didn't see many computers. The few that I did manage to spot all, rather disappointingly appeared to be running dodgy copies of Microsoft Windows. One might have hoped that they'd have developed their own slick-screened bad guy OS like we see in so many films. But no, it was just Windows in Korean. Suck.
North Korea has a history of pirating technology and is much more advanced than most in the outside world realise (did you know they have a 3G mobile phone network with almost 2 million users?), so it was only a matter of time before the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea developed their own operating system.
Via a Russian student studying in the country, I managed to get hold of a copy and, after a fair bit of tinkering have got it up and running. It's a modified version of Linux that's called (in Hangul) Red Star. I can't actually tell what particular distro it's based on but, if you're a bit of a Linux-head, you might find this next screenshot interesting.
To be fair, this is an old version (2.0) and they're likely to have updated it since then. Obviously, the hardware requirements are pretty slight (Pentium III 800 Mhz, 256 Mb RAM, and 3 gigabytes of hard disk space) so it'll run on pretty much anything these days. Anyway, enough with the dull kernel details, let's fire up the GUI.
Is that the KDE 3.5 desktop I see? I think it is. I was hoping for some nationalistic wallpaper or perhaps a picture of the leadership, but no, they've got with a generic KDE wallpaper. Everything is pretty much as you'd expect from a standard Linux distribution and it all works quite nicely. Obviously everything's in Korean and there's no way to switch region settings. It did detect that I was using an English language keyboard and was fine with that though.
Included is a disc of software and it's all pretty generic stuff. There's an office suite, an email program and all the basic stuff you need to use a computer. Nothing very exciting really.
This was the only thing that made me smile. It's the firewall software and it's called Pyongyang Fortress which is a nice touch. It didn't block any sites that I could find and I tried a bunch of South Korean ones and even blogs that were highly critical of the Kims, but it allowed any site I tried. I checked out the network traffic to see if it was phoning home or trying to report my browsing activity, but it wasn't; I guess they do all that at the ISP level.
It happily connected to any site I pointed it at and included Flash support. I started installing a better browser before I realised that I simply didn't care enough to bother.
I really don't have much more to say about it. As a Linux variant it's a perfectly decent, albeit unspectacular, system. I was surprised that it wasn't a bit more... well, North Korean. But aside from a dogged insistence on sticking to Hangul, a nice logo and a couple of amusingly-named software packages, it really didn't do much to distinguish itself. But I'm very pleased to see the DPRK creating its own operating system at last.
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