I wonder whether the 'out of date' refers only to the interface conventions etc., or goes right down to the kernel.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.
N. Korea launches out-of-date OS
11–20 of 22 posts
Re: N. Korea launches out-of-date OS
#12So, 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).
Re: N. Korea launches out-of-date OS
#13Can 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?
Re: N. Korea launches out-of-date OS
#14So, 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'…
> 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.
Re: N. Korea launches out-of-date OS
#15Can we get a copy? I'd love to try this. I'd worry about the North Korean government spying on me though.
You could always run it under some virtual machine and verify if that's really the case. (with packet captures)
Re: N. Korea launches out-of-date OS
#16It 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?
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.
Re: N. Korea launches out-of-date OS
#17I 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 Pen…
You can easily run the latest kernel on a Pentium III without issue.
Re: N. Korea launches out-of-date OS
#18So their OS is the equivalent of Windows 2000? Is that really as terrible as the article implies?
Re: N. Korea launches out-of-date OS
#19Can 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.
Re: N. Korea launches out-of-date OS
#20I 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 Pen…
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.