A day with a fan-mod of North Korea's RedStar OS

I spent a day working with RedStar OS 3.5, a fan mod of North Korea’s homegrown Linux distro that promises to strip out spyware, give root access, and add a modern 64-bit kernel and libraries. Base RedStar 3.0 is long in the tooth—built on Fedora 15 and a 2.6 kernel—so the upgrades sounded promising.

Installation in a virtual machine went surprisingly smoothly, but the graphical login manager kept crashing under QEMU-based virtualization, rendering the desktop a green/blue mess. Booting to the tty worked, but startx refused to bring up the GUI; switching to VirtualBox finally let the login software run and the desktop appear.

The mod itself installs in stages. The first stage, which runs from the 3.5 ISO, removed the spyware markers and granted root access without trouble; the second stage, meant to add the 64-bit kernel and newer libraries, repeatedly failed after hours of work, leaving a spyware-free but still archaic system.

North Korea

redstar os, north korea, fan mod, root access, spyware, 64-bit kernel, virtualbox, qemu, fedora 15, startx