North Korea has its own OS

[Tigranes]

As everyone knows, one of North Korea's most important principles is 'Juche', which roughly means self-subsistence, independence, etc. That everything North Korea needs and wants should, and can, be produced within North Korea using its own resources and technology. This has led to some debacles with cars, fridges and such, but on paper, the principle continues... and very interestingly, in the West, produces a range of hilarious memorabilia that is a fashion trend all on its own.

 

Now, we discover that North Korean computers - what few there are - use their own operating system called Red Star. You can go to the Russian student's blog to take a look. I can't read it, but the pictures have Korean on them;

 

"Red Star", then "User System 2.0"

 

The tabs along the top basically say "File", "edit", etc - pretty standard. This screen is a program installation one, some sort of storage program - literally they are called "National Storage Unit" and "Remote Storage Unit".

 

The webpage shows Firefox 3.6, with the typical firefox welcome screen simply in Korean. Funnily enough, then, on the bottom right, there is a pop-up which introduces this browser as "Nae Nara" (My Country), with the words "Nae Nara browser is a very light and fast web browser made with the users' convenience in mind."

 

"Document Process System 2.0, Pyeongyang Printing Industry University Information Centre, 2007-2009.

This product is protected by the Democratic People's Republic of Korea Computer Software Protection Law."

Even North Korea has DRM!

 

edit: stupid img tags that i can't use

[Deadly_Nightshade]

This article has more pictures and, I think, a translation of the original blog post.

[Tigranes]

They translated it?

 

Bastards

[Deadly_Nightshade]

They translated it?

 

Only some of it, looking at the original blog it seems that he wrote more that they had.

[Humodour]

their own operating system called Red Star.

 

The kernal is Linux and the GUI is a mishmash of KDE and Gnome.

 

North Korea owns any branding or art assets, nothing else - it is open source (not that I expect them to adhere to that).