Red Star OS | Matt's Blog

Linus Torvalds never saw this coming. North Korea, one of the world’s most restrictive communist countries, used a version of Linux, an open source operating system, to create it’s own proprietary version, named Red Star OS. It is believed to have originated from Red Hat Linux, which is developed by a company based in Raleigh, North Carolina. Red Star OS was originally developed by the KCC (Korea Computer Center) which is a major software development center in Pyongyang. It uses a highly customized version of the KDE 3 desktop environment. It first became widely available when a Russian student student studying at Kim Il Sung University purchased a copy and posted it on his blog. At the end of 2013, a computer scientist named Will Scott, who was lecturing at Pyongyang University of Science and Technology, purchased an updated version and posted some screenshots. In version 3, which Scott purchased, users can see a very different UI than in version 2, the former strongly resembling Mac OS X. It has basic software pre-installed, such as a text editor, email client, audio & video players, and a modified version of Mozilla Firefox named Naenara (My Country) for access to the Kwangmyong national intranet. It’s internal calendar also reports in the year 2014 that it is year 103 – the number of years since the birth of the Eternal President Kim Il-sung. According to Engadget, version 2 required a Pentium III 800MHz processor with 256MB RAM and 3GB hard drive space.