It may not have been popular, or even easy, but the simple fact that a PS3 could boot and run Linux was a pretty awesome, one that will sadly be phased out on April 1st. According to the official Playstation blog April fools day will mark the release of Firmware version 3.21, and the death of the “install other OS” option on non slim PS3’s.

Sony wasn’t really specific as to why support for such a long-standing feature was being dropped, but like everything that’s hard to explain “Security concerns” was picked as a blanket excuse.

April fools day is a terrible occasion to try and convince people you’re making a serious announcement, but the fact that they released this statement a week earlier makes it look like they are serious.

Will you miss Linux support on your PS3?

Dell has told a Linux-loving Reg reader that he can’t receive a refund on the copy of Windows 7 that shipped with his new Dell netbook because it was bundled with the machine for “free”.

In October, another Reg reader succeeded in gaining a $115 (£70.34) refund from the computer maker after he rejected the licence for Microsoft’s OS and installed Linux instead. Microsoft’s EULA, provides for such a refund.

If you don’t use the software, then basically you are not accepting their terms, in which case you should return it to the retailer for a refund or credit, goes a suggestion.

But then it always doesn’t work out to be like that.According to a company support rep, some members are not entitled to a refund because their copy of Windows 7 was included with their machines for free.

Presumably, the rep is mistaking owner’s copy of Windows 7 – which came preloaded on his system – with the Windows 7 upgrade kit that OEMs provided with Windows XP systems around the time of the new OS’s launch last fall.

Asked about refunds for rejected copies of Windows 7, Dell tells us that despite the $115 success of Reg reader Graeme Cobbett, the company policy is that it will only accept returns for the entire system, given that they consider the OS,part of the base config, like and other key components (e.g. processor, memory, etc.).

In any case, Windows 7 is not free.

NorthScale recently launched a new data management technology to help web-based companies, particularly startups that deal with large amounts of transactional data.(Social gaming giant Zynga has been using NorthScale since December).

Founded by leaders of the memcached open source project, NorthScale is like Red Hat for Linux; the startup is commercializing the open source technology. As web applications generate vast volumes of data, there is a need for a data management technology that caters towards transactional software systems. NorthScale’s elastic data infrastructure software promises to cache frequently used data while also offering performance and scalability.

The NorthScale Memcached Server also includes the ability to securely support multiple applications on a shared cluster, and allows a memcached cluster to dynamically change with automatic client updates. The NorthScale Membase Server is a high performance, distributed key‐value database which builds on the NorthScale Memcached Server foundation and is directly compatible with memcached APIs and client libraries.

A former Sun Microsystems’ executive has re-assured worried OpenSolaris users the open-source operating system has a future under new owner Oracle.

Dan Roberts, Oracle director of product management, has said the database giant will continue to invest in OpenSolaris and will deliver the operating system’s next incarnation: OpenSolaris 2010.03.

Roberts repeated the official party line coming from Oracle when it’s asked about plans for the Sun hardware and software products that Oracle has decided to keep.

But a former director of Solaris, OpenSolaris, and database marketing said certain features would be kept out of the community pool.The comments on OpenSolaris follow growing concern among members of the OpenSolaris community that their product had gone almost unmentioned during Oracle’s recent Sun-strategy outing, and that – despite reaching out to Oracle – they’d had heard nothing back.

OpenSolaris project manager Peter Tribble complained they’d been completely ignored, with their questions over the project’s future going unanswered. OpenSolaris developer and evangelist Ben Rockwood also wrote an open letter pleading for information.

Yellow Dog is no longer the darling Linux for Apple machines since the latter company switched to Intel Core and Xeon processors for its PCs and servers a few years back. And Terra Soft doesn’t exist any more, after it was acquired by a Japanese company called Fixstars in November 2008.And Yellow Dog is still looking for a way to find a cool spot to lay down, and this time it’s playing with Nvidia’s CUDA programming environment for its Tesla family of GPU co-processors.

Fixstars says that it has rolled up a special release of its Linux, called Yellow Dog Enterprise Linux for CUDA, optimized to take better advantage of the Nvidia GPUs to handle calculations. Fixstars is not new to the idea of creating tools to make use of co-processors. Terra Soft was the official Linux for the “Cell” Power-derived processor created by IBM, Sony, and Toshiba – Yellow Dog was certified to run on Sony’s PlayStation 3 game consoles and on blade servers made by IBM and Mercury Computer that were based on the Cell chips.

IBM erased the next-generation QSZ2 two-socket Cell blade servers nearly two years ag. Big Blue has other plans for hybrid processors aimed at supercomputers after deploying Cell co-processors in a number of high-end machines, including the 1 petaflops Opteron-Cell hybrid running at Los Alamos National Laboratories. With Cell being left in the hands of Sony and Toshiba for future development, all companies that had a stake in the Cell game have to look for other platforms on which to serve their niches.

Nvidia is ramping up its Fermi GPU co-processor line right now, so tweaking Yellow Dog to better support Nvidia’s GPUs when used as math units for central processors seems like a logical enough choice. Fixstars is not the first company to embed and support the CUDA programming environment, which simplifies the way compilers and operating systems on PCs and servers dispatch work to GPUs in their own product. Grid computing expert Platform Computing announced preciously that it was embedding CUDA into its Platform Cluster Manager and HPC Workgroup Manager tools for managing grids.

With Yellow Dog Enterprise Linux for CUDA, Fixstars is embracing the combination of x64 processors and Tesla co-processors as an alternative to Cell-based systems. The distro includes multiple versions of CUDA, which programmers can toggle between as necessary depending on their hardware and applications, and it has everything programmers need to write code that takes advantage of CUDA using Fixstars Eclipse-compatible IDE. The offering also has a single support fee and one mechanism to provide that support, rather than having to deal with finger pointing between Fixstars and Nvidia.

The other thing that Fixstars is promising is better performance on HPC workloads using its Linux atop x64 servers with Tesla GPUs – as much as 9 per cent more oomph compared to off-the-shelf Linux distros like Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. The reason is that Fixstars is tuning its Yellow Dog distro specifically for HPC workloads, not generic Web application and database workloads that RHEL and SLES are tuned for.

Polaris Retail Infotech Ltd. (PRIL), a retail software provider and a wholly owned subsidiary of Polaris Software Lab Ltd, has launched a Linux-powered Retail Store Management solution called ‘iStore Linux’, it being the first SOA-based retail solution in India which is based on the open standards-based Java Platform.

With the launch of iStore Linux, PRIL has also signed up Samsonite as a customer who will implement the retail store management solution across its 60 exclusive brand outlets across India.

It is being bundled with IBM’s Retail Integration Framework. According to Polaris Retail, the combination of the SOA-based iStore application on a Linux system can bring the set-up and running cost of retail store software by half.

Other reasons cited for Samsonite (India) choosing PRIL’s iStore bundled with IBM’s Retail Integration Framework were scalability and flexibility.

PRIL is now entering the US and Eastern Europe market with ‘Intellect Store’. The company has over 35,000 POS counters across the subcontinent.