Talk:Red Star OS

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Confirmation[edit]

(I'm well familiar with Linux. Not well familiar with Korea. So please excuse my stupid question)

It seems all stories are based on two sources:

The report of the russian student: http://ashen-rus.livejournal.com/4300.html
Analysis by some South Korean institute.

The report includes a whole bunch of screen-shots, but apart from that is rather low on technical details. I went over the comments to the article, and at first glance the author provides there just about 0 more extra information. This seems surprising. Note I only read English and only used automated and partial translation.

The analysis seems full of propaganda. It does not seem to add any extra technical details (again, from the second-hand translated reports I read). I find it surprising that while the Russian student reports it was rather simple to purchase the CDs, the South Korean institute could not get their hands on extra copies. Thus I must assume they could, if they wanted.

The extra bit of information it quotes is a defector from North Korea who claims that such a project was under way at 2001 (or is it 2002?). Again, what do we know about that project since?

So what do we actually know about this project?

If anybody has a copy of this OS, please provide some details such as:

The output of uname -a
The packaging system used (deb? rpm? home-brewed? On top of them: apt? yum? anything else?)
Versions of various important packages: glibc, kde/kdelibs, firefox.

If anybody has that and does not know how to get such information, feel free to contact me.

Tzafrir (talk) 09:04, 7 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Actually, up until yesterday, it would be quite difficult for a South Korean institute to get its hands on a copy, so your assumption was wrong. But fortunately, yesterday, the author of the blog posted a torrent of the installer CD: [1]. So anyone who wants to install it, go knock yourself out. I for one am more interested in the social history of the thing (who produced it and why) rather than which version of Firefox they stole and rebranded.

Why is it so difficult? Consider that the author of the blog which first published those screenshots is:

a computer owner and reasonably expert user
who knows that there is a computer market in Pyongyang
who knows that North Korea have their own Linuxoid distribution
who has permanent residency permission in Pyongyang and won't be followed everywhere by a "guide"

For him and maybe a few other people on the planet, it is indeed a relatively simple thing to walk down the street, buy it, install it, and write about it on the internet. (For average North Koreans and for average foreigners, the difficulties come at different stages of that process, but the end result is the same: no blog post with screenshots). Similarly, the extra information is not from a defector, but rather from the Choson Sinbo, newspaper of Chongryon, a "pro-North Korean" group in Japan whose top members tend to have pretty free access to arrange meetings with government institutes in North Korea and do interviews.

A South Korean think tank or newspaper has no access like that. They have no reliable way of getting physical goods like CDs, or even large amounts of computer data, out of the North. For all of their goods and information, they have to rely on tourists or overseas Koreans (from China and Japan) who go to the North to visit relatives, along with a very small number of channels of officially-approved cooperation. The tourists might not be able to get permission from their "guide" to go to the computer market. If the tourists also plan to go to South Korea later, they may also be worried that they'll be prosecuted for "possession of anti-state literature". cab (call) 02:37, 23 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

This might be a few years late, but here's what it throws back after uname -a:

Linux localhost.localdomain 2.6.25-14.rs2.0.i686 #1 SMP Fri Jul 24 19:10:00 KST 2009 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux

If you're still around after these 4 years, here you go. Also, it uses rpm packages, and yum 3.2.7 is installed by default (I'm not sure whether it is actually capable of doing anything). --benlisquare_T•C•E 06:21, 14 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Operating system?[edit]

The article says: "Red Star OS is a North Korean Linux-based operating system", but it looks like it is only a Linux distribution. The article also says: "Based on the KDE 3.x desktop system, Red Star OS"; shouldn'it rather read: "the graphic user interface of Red Star OS"? Apokrif (talk) 11:24, 22 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

A Linux distribution is an operating system. "Distribution" is a terminology that is rather specific to Linux.Tzafrir (talk) 15:51, 27 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Red Star Linux 2.0 torrent[edit]

Someone posted a link in the article to a torrent file that should allow downloading "Red Flag Linux". Any way to verify this torrent actually includes what it should? And does not include any added malware by some third party?

Update: Downloaded it. It includes two CD images. The first is a Redhat-like installer, and the second contains extra packages in a set of yum package repositories.

It seems to be mostly based on Fedora (core) 6 and Fedora 8. Almost all packages have been at least rebuilt (530 out of 575 in the first CD include '.rs2' as part of the revision "number"). Looking at the rpm changelog, it seems that some of them have seen work. I did not verify signatures of packages. I should also note that the install.exe on the first CD looks a bit odd. I don't recall those on Fedora CDs. Tzafrir (talk) 17:37, 11 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Update 2: The torrent links to thepiratebay.org. Is it ethical or even legal for WP to be posting links to pirated software? I heard it was being sold (ironic in itself as it's Linux) for just $5 in North Korea, but that's still piracy… FieryEquinox (talk) 17:08, 29 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

External links modified[edit]

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Root access[edit]

Some one added: "Users, however, can't gain full privileges to the system, even if they're administrators. Commands such as sudo and su are not available.[9]" And then cited a video of a talk at a Chaos Computer Club conference.

https://media.ccc.de/v/32c3-7174-lifting_the_fog_on_red_star_os

There's no issue in my mind with the source of the citation, excepting the fact that Florian Grunow in the video says precisely the opposite to what is claimed above. And I quote:

"Then you have a programme which is called 'rootsetting', and it basically gives you root. o if you look into the documentation it says that you're not supposed to have root on the system for integrity purposes, but if you want to get root you an use this tool.

This is like they are not hiding anything. There are rumours on the net that say that you're not supposed to get root on this system because it's so locked down. This is not true because there is intended software, intended to give to you administrative privileges."

I'll be editing the page to reflect this reality. 82.71.39.170 (talk) 13:43, 12 May 2017 (UTC) Ecadre (talk) 13:45, 12 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

red hat[edit]

why does the article say that north korea used redhat before they made redstar? i thought they used windows xp — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2A02:C7F:82A:7900:B191:8060:4C0F:FE18 (talk) 18:37, 1 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

What is availability outside North Korea?[edit]

I am interested in learning the availability of the OS outside North Korea. Is the OS available for download? Can it be purchased through postal mail? Or is it held as a secret? Jeffrey Walton (talk) 11:39, 8 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I just Googled "red star os download" ~~redacted~~ flarn2006 [u t c] time: 22:07, 18 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Watermark[edit]

In the section Media attention, there is a paragraph that reads: "In 2015, two German researchers speaking at the Chaos Communication Congress[14] described the internal operation of the OS.[15] The North Korean government wants to track the underground market of USB flash drives used to exchange foreign films, music and writing,[16] so the system watermarks all files on portable media attached to computers.[17]"

A YouTuber named "Druaga1" proved this wrong in a video he made exploring Red Star OS. Shouldn't that paragraph be removed because of this new info? Deterritorialize (talk) 22:08, 14 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]