Open Source on IT News

After 30 Years of Development, Open-Source Windows Clone ReactOS Can Finally Run Half-Life 2

Sun, 05 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0800

The ReactOS project has been chasing a seemingly impossible goal for nearly 30 years: build an open-source operating system that can run Windows applications. It has been a slow, grinding process. But this week, the team hit two milestones. One is a fun demo. The other could matter for years to come.

First, the fun part. ReactOS can now run Half-Life 2.

That is a 22-year-old game, and on paper it does not sound like much. But it is a real step up from last month, when the project showed footage of the original Half-Life booting on ReactOS. Half-Life 2 uses Valve’s Source engine, which demands far more from an OS — DirectX 9 rendering, threaded audio, and complex input handling. Getting it to boot means the ReactOS kernel, graphics stack, and driver model are all working together at a level they have never reached before.

The test rig used a GeForce GTX 960 with NVIDIA’s legacy 368.61 Windows driver and a Creative Sound Blaster Audigy sound card. The latest nightly build launched the game.

Fedora scraps AI desktop plan after community backlash

Sun, 05 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0800

Ubuntu is leaning hard into AI. Fedora just went the other direction — and the community made sure of it.

kernel.org Went Dark for 12 Hours — a Mirror Config Was to Blame

Sun, 05 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0800

On the evening of July 2, anyone trying to download a Linux kernel from the official website hit a wall. The latest releases returned 404 errors. Archived versions returned 403 errors. For more than half a day, kernel.org was effectively broken for its most basic function.

Linux Bumps RISC-V CPU Core Limit From 64 to 256 — Hardware Is Already Running Ahead

Sat, 04 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0800

Linux’s default cap on how many CPU cores a RISC-V system can support just got a lot bigger — from 64 to 256 — and the change is already merged into the 7.2-rc2 tree.

Bridgewater tested GPT, Claude, and Gemini on basic financial judgment tasks. None passed.

Fri, 03 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0800

If you ask a hedge fund analyst whether a central bank document signals an upcoming rate change, they’ll tell you in seconds. Ask them to write down exactly how they know — the rules and heuristics behind that call — and most will struggle.

This gap between tacit expertise and explicit reasoning is what makes financial judgment hard to automate. And it’s exactly where today’s frontier AI models fall short.

Kodi 22 Beta Ships With FFmpeg 8.1, Rewritten Linux Rendering, and Long-Requested Audio Fixes

Tue, 30 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0800

Kodi has been the backbone of DIY home theaters for nearly two decades, and the project shows no signs of slowing down. The latest beta release — codenamed “Piers” — brings together months of under-the-hood work that should matter to anyone running a media server on a Raspberry Pi, an old laptop, or a dedicated HTPC.

Linux 7.2-rc1 goes live with cache-aware scheduling, tops 43 million lines of code

Mon, 29 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0800

Linux 7.2-rc1 is out, and it’s the kind of release that tells you two things at once: how fast the kernel keeps growing, and where the next wave of performance work is really focused.

Linus Torvalds opened the merge window two weeks ago, closed it this weekend, and the numbers are in. The kernel now sits at over 43 million lines of code. About a third of that delta comes from a single source: AMD submitted a fresh batch of header files packed with GPU register definitions for their ever-expanding hardware lineup. The rest covers the usual ground — architecture updates, tooling improvements, and documentation.

DeepSeek and Peking University Open Source DSpark, an AI Inference Accelerator That Boosts Throughput by Up to 85%

Sat, 27 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0800

There’s a quiet tension inside every AI chatbot: the model generates text one token at a time, each step requiring a full forward pass through billions of parameters. The longer the output, the longer the wait. DeepSeek, working with researchers at Peking University, just open-sourced a framework called DSpark that tackles this bottleneck head-on, and the numbers are striking.

Weibo CLI Tool Officially Launched: Built for Developers and AI Agents, 70+ APIs at Your Fingertips

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 18:13:00 +0800

Weibo’s open platform has officially launched “weibo-cli,” an official command-line tool designed specifically for developers and AI Agents, enabling direct invocation of over 70 Weibo platform APIs from the terminal environment.

Coreboot 26.06 Released with Support for Intel Nova Lake and AMD Strix Halo Platforms

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 09:42:00 +0800

The open-source firmware project Coreboot (formerly known as LinuxBIOS) has released version 26.06, bringing preliminary support for Intel Nova Lake and AMD Strix Halo platforms along with a host of new features and motherboard additions.

Critical FFmpeg Vulnerability Lets Attackers Hijack Systems via Malicious Video Files

Tue, 23 Jun 2026 20:48:00 +0800

A critical security vulnerability has been discovered in FFmpeg, the world’s most widely deployed open-source multimedia framework, that allows attackers to hijack systems simply by getting them to process a maliciously crafted video file. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-8461 with a CVSS severity score of 8.8 out of 10, has already been patched in an emergency release.

NetEase Open-Sources Confucius4-TTS: 3-Second Voice Cloning Across 14 Languages, Zero Accent

Tue, 23 Jun 2026 16:00:00 +0800

NetEase Youdao has thrown open the doors on one of the most ambitious voice AI projects to date, announcing the full open-source release of Confucius4-TTS — the “Ziyue 4.0” text-to-speech engine that can clone a human voice from just three seconds of audio and reproduce it across 14 languages with zero detectable accent. It is, the company claims, the first open-source model to achieve cross-lingual, accent-free voice cloning without requiring reference text.

UK Government Invests £60 Million in AI Labs to Challenge US Dominance with Open-Source Models

Tue, 23 Jun 2026 14:56:00 +0800

The United Kingdom is placing a bold bet on open-source artificial intelligence, announcing a £60 million (approximately RMB 539 million) investment to establish two dedicated AI laboratories at the University of Oxford and University College London (UCL). The initiative is explicitly designed to develop AI models that run on lower hardware requirements — a direct challenge to the resource-intensive, proprietary systems that have given American technology giants a commanding lead in the field.

SpaceX Inks $6.3 Billion AI Compute Deal with Open-Source Startup Reflection

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 20:00:00 +0800

SpaceX has signed a landmark compute infrastructure agreement with open-source artificial intelligence startup Reflection AI, a deal that could be worth as much as $6.3 billion over its full term, according to a report by CNBC.

Microsoft Surface RT Gets Mainline Linux Kernel Driver After 14 Years

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 18:40:00 +0800

Fourteen years after Microsoft launched the original Surface RT in a bid to challenge Apple’s iPad, the aging ARM-powered tablet has received an unexpected revival: a mainline Linux kernel driver that brings proper battery and charging status support to the device.