• CaptainBasculin
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    4 days ago

    Another fun fact about North Korea: They have their own Linux Distro by the name Red Star OS, which has its 3.0 version leaked to the Internet, while the newest known version is 4.0.

    My observations while trying out the leaked 3.0 are:

    *It is a fedora derivative,its package manager made me think it’s something close to CentOS 6.3.

    *It’s visuals are really similar to Mac OS. Perhaps the state official behind this project really liked Mac?

    *Every piece of software installed has its credits removed, they have help prompts that refer to them being made in some sort of university.

    *It leaves strange markings to created files. I couldn’t understand what they do exactly, but I assume it could be used to track the computer that made the files.

    *Their browser does not support https, and does not have English support at all.

    *Packages intended for developers aren’t installed by default, doesn’t have a remote repository but instead was intended to be installed with a physical media drive.

    *Just for fun, I tried to request the Linux kernel’s source code that the developers behind used, as it’s licensed by GPL. I was unsuccessful; which means this is the first time a state sponsored software is violating GPL.

      • CaptainBasculin
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        4 days ago

        There exists state sponsored Linux distros for various reasons. As far as i can recall China, India and Turkey has their distros available publically. I also remember reading about a distro Russia was working on, but I don’t remember what happened to it. Could be a project to use internally by Russian govt.