Red star os 3.0 Russian version. North Korean operating system - Red Star OS

North Korean-made distribution kit - Red Star 3.0. Earlier versions of this distribution were available before, but this version is relatively recent, dated 12/12/2013.

The torrent file contains the rss3_32_key_gui_20131212.iso (817M) distribution itself, the cracked boot.iso (37M) bootloader and readme.txt

At first I tried to run the distribution in my favorite QEMU, however, for some reason the installer did not go to the process of copying files, so I had to use VirtualBox.

Yes, you read that correctly, this is a serial number request. You need to run the installer through boot.iso, it contains a cracked loader that does not check the serial number.

Press "Enter" and go to the network settings:

In business! This is not a joke! North Korea keeps up with modern technologies- IPv6 out of the box.

We get the IP address ...

You need to enter the root password. Password must contain capital letter, a number and a special character.

Oooop ...

Disk layout. I was afraid of manual markup and used automatic (topmost item). Used LVM.

On the next screen, we are asked to select the packages to be installed. Among them are Apache, PHP, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Java and others.

If we go to the "GUI" menu, we will be given a choice: KDE, QT3 and QT4. I don't really understand what exactly QT3 and QT4 give, so I chose KDE.

If you select the last two items (antivirus and virtualization tool) in the previous menu, you can install the GUI for them as well.

The process has begun ...

Loading ... loading very quickly, by the way, faster than typical distributions.

Here comes the desktop. There are not very many desktop applications: a browser (fork of firefox 10), a PDF reader, an image viewer, a GUI for QEMU and an antivirus customizer.

Browser.

GUI to QEMU.

Supports both Linux

So is Windows.

Antivirus customizer. Wants an administrator password from me, which I don't know. The ROOT password does not work. The error message is exactly the same: "Enter the administrator password."

Input Pad. Opens on the "Noble names" section, the first line says "Kim Il Sung Kim Jong Il Kim Jong Eun"

List of running processes.

Listening ports.

yum.conf. Nothing unusual.

Installed sachets.

Boring wallpaper.

It's kind of boring, I thought it would be much ... much better. But very boring, just very boring. I thought it would be much better. How many times have the OS installed! It was much better, but this time somehow it didn’t work-o-axis ... Firstly, there are few applications, the OS is not very good ...

Specialists from North Korea have released a new version of the national operating system - Red Star OS 3.0.

What's new in the new version of Red Star? Almost everything.

As noted by netizens, previous builds of Red Star borrowed the interface and design from operating systems of the Windows family, in particular Windows XP, while Red Star 3.0 uses external elements that resemble those in Apple OS X. With the Apple OS X operating system, Red Star OS 3.0 has many similarities, such as: shortcut bar at the bottom of the screen, appearance windows, cursor and others. Also in the interface of Red Star there is a top panel, and in the upper corner, in place of the usual Apple users - an apple, there is a red star.

To the vastness of the network, distribution kit from DPRK - Red Star OS 3.0 posted by a user with a nickname Slipstream, who published the server version of the Red Star OS 3.0 operating system on the network last year. The resource CNews writes that you can free download Red Star OS 3.0... from a torrent, the image size is about 2.4 GB.

The first reports of the release of the new operating system Red Star OS 3.0 became known back in 2014. The screenshots were leaked to the internet thanks to Will Scott, a native of the United States who is also a professor of computer science in North Korea.

The Korean Computer Center has been producing Red Star OS since 2002- North Korean, national operating system for computers. Red Star OS is entirely based on the Linux kernel, as well as the KDE 3 desktop environment. Red Star OS has a built-in browser called Naenara (this is a modified version of the Mozilla Firefox browser we are used to), as well as a number of preinstalled "out of the box" applications , one of which is Wine, which provides the ability to run programs written for systems of the Windows family.

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Donor challenge: Your donation will be matched 2-to-1 right now. Your $ 5 gift becomes $ 15!

Dear Internet Archive Community,

I'll get right to it: please support the Internet Archive today. Right now, we have a 2-to-1 Matching Gift Campaign, so you can triple your impact, but time is running out! The average donation is $ 45. If everyone reading this chips in just $ 5, we can keep this website going for free, and free of ads. That "s right, all we need is the price of a paperback book to sustain a non-profit website the whole world depends on. For 23 years this has been my dream: for a generation of learners who turn to their screens for answers, I want to put the very best information at their fingertips. We’re dedicated to reader privacy so we never track you. We don’t accept ads. But we still need to pay for servers and staff. If you find our site useful, we ask you humbly, please chip in. Thank you.
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Red Star OS (Red Star) - North Korean operating system, this system, based on Red Hat Linux, was developed by the Korea Computer Center in 2002. It's pretty major center development in Pyongyang. Until this time, English-language versions of Windows were commonly used in North Korea.

The Red Star operating system first became available outside North Korea in 2010. When one of the Russian students published it on the Internet.

The new version of the Red Star Linux 3.0 operating system completely changed its own interface, and was presented in February 2014.

System requirements for hardware to run Red Star OS:

Pentium III 800 MHz
256MB of RAM
3GB hard disk space

Moreover, the previous version of the system was based on the popular KDE, which imitated the appearance of Windows 7.

The desktop version includes a modified Mozilla Firefox browser called "Nenara" (short for My Country) for browsing the North Korean intranet. Other software includes a text editor, a mail program, a media player, and computer games.

In general, it is very difficult to assess the gaming industry in North Korea. There is almost no one to develop games there. One of the most popular games is the Ryongyang Racer browser game. In it, players are invited to ride a car through the empty streets of the capital to look at the sights of Pyongyang.

Here are a couple of screenshots of Red Star OS:

Whilst everyone else in the UK is panicking over the results of the EU referendum, I decided, as usual to do something completely different. Here I’m going to review the Operating System designed for use by the citizens of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, or North Korea as it’s more commonly known.

Red Star OS is a very interesting system. Approved by the North Korean regime, the system was designed only for use in the country, with tools and software preinstalled for the people of the country, and preconfigured to work on DPRK's isolated intranet.

A quick look at the image above of my own laptop running Red Star OS 3.0 (in a virtual machine, of course), you can’t help but notice how much it looks like a typical Mac OS X system. This is not just from a front end point prospective, the whole system down to how files are arranged on the hard drive, and how software is saved on the system, emulate OS X. I am personally very impressed how well this system accurately replicates that OS X experience to the user. Unfortunately, Red Star also hides a nasty dark side from the user, but more on this later.

The OS X replication is actually a new feature for version 3 of the system with previous versions supposedly resembling Windows XP, the system still commonly used in DPRK. Personally, from screenshots, I think it looks like a slightly modified KDE 3.X desktop, which is exactly what it is. The intriguing thing about version 3 and its OS X likeness is that the system is still heavily based on KDE 3.X. But why go to all the bother of replicating OS X at all? The general consensus is that it’s down to a picture of the North Korean’s supreme leader, Kim Jong Un, at a desk with an iMac close by.

But enough talking, lets install this. Firstly, anyone else feeling brave enough can head over to this site and download, not only Red Star OS 3.0 Desktop, but also Red Star OS 3.0 Server, and Red Star OS 2. Once you have the ISO downloaded, you can either install it into a VM (Highly Recommended), or burn it to DVD and install it on physical hardware. I've opted to install it into Virtual Box. I can’t guarantee results on other virtualization platforms, I can confirm the guest additions for Virtual Box will install on Red Star after a bit of tinkering.

So, when first powering on the system, it takes a few minutes before we see anything, but eventually, this screen pops up. There is no option to switch the installer to anything but Korean language, so we have to guess everything we’re doing.

We have to create a user account, on this screen the boxes represent the following:

Name (This is limited to 16 characters)
Username
Password
Confirm Password
Password hint

Now we sit back and let the installer do its thing. Time to grab a coffee.

So we're now ready to boot into our new shiny system. The installer automatically ejects the DVD and give the user 30 seconds before rebooting automatically. In a few brief moments, we’re presented with this login dialogue box.

Once we log in, we are presented with, for regular OS X users, a very familiar desktop, clicking the Red Star icon in the top left hand corner, we can select a menu item that represents the “About This Mac” function, which will allow us to look at what's in this system.

So, the first thing we want to do at this stage is to get the Virtual Box guest additions installed to allow for better integration. Unfortunately, this isn’t a simple task as system integrity is a big part Red Star OS. The system is known to complain when some files have been changed, or go into an endless reboot loop when system files have been modified. Parts of the system are protected by SELinux with some very specific rules. The system also watermarks files that have been opened (or accessed in any way, even if the user hasn’t actively opened it) on the system. The theory here is that any files that the regime doesn’t approve of can be tracked back to users have had a copy.

Thankfully, a couple of German hackers - Niklaus Schiess and Florian Grunow - explored the system in great detail and provide steps on disabling the security features. This can be found on their GitHub project page: https://github.com/takeshixx/redstar-tools

I had to deviate a little from their instructions as it’s not mentioned how to get Red Star to connect to the outside world to grab their scripts or source code. Fortunately, the libos library replacement source code is only 3 simple lines of code that can be easily rewritten by hand. Some tools also need to be installed after gaining root access. To do this, firstly disable the yum repo that points to / media /, as this causes issues with yum.

mv /etc/yum.repos.d/rs-core-03000.repo(,-disable)

Then enter the RPMS folder on the Red Star installation Disc:

cd / media / RedStar \ Desktop \ 3.0 / RedStar / RPMS /

Finally, run the following to install the required packages:

yum localinstall glibc-headers-2.10.1-2.i386.rpm glibc-devel-2.10.1-2.i386.rpm ncurses-devel-5.6-0.rs3.0.i386.rpm gcc-4.4.0-4 .i386.rpm kernel-devel-2.6.38.8-24.rs3.0.i686.rpm

I've included the Kernel development package here to allow us to install the Virtual Box guest additions. Once the dependencies are installed, and the steps in the github repo have been followed, we can change the system to use the English language. This is not an option that can be configured in the UI and requires the system's protection to be disabled as mentioned above. Running the following will switch the system's language:

sed -i "s / ko_KP / en_US / g" / etc / sysconfig / i18n
sed -i "s / ko_KP / en_US / g" / usr / share / config / kdeglobals

At this point we should reboot. Once restarted the system will be a lot easier to use. I assume the above commands can be modified for your own native tongue, but I haven’t tried this.

We can now go about installing the guest additions. We have to do this manually as Red Star, unsurprisingly, doesn’t include them in RPM form. Simply close your terminal (or change directory to a location outside of the DVD), eject the Red Star DVD from within the system, and select “Insert Guest Additions CD Image” on Virtual Box. After that, launch a new terminal and navigate to the Guest Additions mount point and run the Linux installation.

cd /media/VBOXADDITIONS_5.0.18_106667/
./VBoxLinuxAdditions.run

Installing the guest additions causes some files to be changed, which Red Star's integrity checker picks up on and displays errors. The messages can be disabled from the security section in the system preferences.

Lets have a look at the applications included on the default install.

Here we see, right out of the box, Red Star comes with many useful applications: A full office suite, media player, web browser, pdf editor, text edit, sheet music editor, calendar, calculator, and email application, to name a few.

But lets look at the web browser in more detail.

The Naenara web browser is simply a rebadged copy of Firefox 3.5b4. This is a particularly old release that debuted on 27th April 2009. This shouldn’t be too much of a security issue, as the web browser is only intended to be used within North Korea’s intranet.

In the screenshot, the Naenara browser, by default, doesn’t honor the system’s language settings. A few applications are like this. My best guess is that the software it's based on doesn’t have Korean language support and require modifying to do so. In Naenara's case, a Firefox extension has been installed which provides the Korean language support. A simple case of disabling the extension and restarting Naenara brings the interface up in English.

In the last two screenshots, you can see Naenara attempting to connect to a site under the IP address of 10.76.1.11, this appears to host the Naenara home page, but without being in North Korea, it’s impossible to tell for certain. Attempting to load any other web site results in an error saying the connection is unavailable. It turns out that Red Star has IPTables firewall rules set up to only allow communications within the DPRK's intranet. This can be resolved by removing the firewall rules entirely:

rm / etc / sysconfig / iptables
service iptables restart

At this point, all unencrypted websites are accessible. This is fine until you try accessing a site served over HTTPS.

Every HTTPS site shows an error, this is due to Naenara not shipping with any of the root certificates apart from ones for internal communications within the country. Installing vanilla Firefox 3.5 onto the system allows you to access the sites without errors, apart from a few minor caveats which are most likely due to the age of the browser.

There are so many more things that can be said about this system, but I’m aware of this post is already pretty long, so I’m going to wrap this up with a little bit about the optional components that can also be installed. Pop in your installation DVD again, and you’ll find a file called “optional.repo”. This will launch an OS X style installation window which will let you install a whole host of extra applications, console tools, and development libraries.

Once these are installed, the number of applications in the applications menu increases, and also includes a front end for installing Windows applications via WINE.

It's uncertain how often the OS is updated and if any extra backdoors are included when the system updates. Without access to North Korea's intranet this can’t be tested.

So, lets wrap this up by shutting down the machine. Again, the shutdown process replicates OS X. It seems strange that a government would go to the length of creating a whole system designed to snoop on its citizens, but these are the kinds of stories we're used to hearing about coming from North Korea ... A bit of advice, I wouldn’t use this as my primary operating system, for obvious reasons. But as for snooping, I’m highly doubtful that Red Star would be able to successfully snoop on any of my activity, as I’m almost certain that any spying it does relies on the DPRK’s intranet being available.

A big shoutout to the following sites where I got a lot of information from to get this up and running: