If you guys weren’t terrified of North Korea by now, here’s more evidence that the country is absolutely nuts: they’ve developed their own Linux distribution! It’s called Red Star OS, and we can thank a Russian student for unearthing it for us. I now fully expect to see knee-jerk reactions like, “Down with Linux!” even though that makes no sense at all.
The distro costs $5, and the included readme file contains kind words from Kim Jong Il, who says that it’s important that the DPRK have an operating system that gels with its values. Install time takes about 15 minutes, and there’s one language available: Korean.
Judging by the screenshots, it doesn’t look too crazy at all; it’s your standard Linux distro. (If I were to go Linux full-time, I’d probably go with Linux Mint, merely because it looks neat.)
My concern is that people who don’t really understand tech too well will see that North Korea has this, and will automatically assume that Linux is Evil. That’s clearly not true. The fact is, it’s fairly easy to whip up your own Linux distro these days. I’d be surprised if the neighborhood geek doesn’t have his own distro at this point.
Now all we need is for the ISO to be released so we can all give it a shot.
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