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A significant portion of my second year college work dealt with psychology of the senses. Color plays a powerful role in how we perceive, interpret and react to an event, a situation or an environment. Both Microsoft and Apple have spent millions on volumes of research and focus groups. Do you think that the dominate shades of blue in Windows, or the close proximity Apple keeps with grey, silver and metal, is by haphazard design?

At the very least, I expect to find that at SELF even the software will be southern fried and smothered with gravy. That’s because SELF intends to be more than just another LinuxFest. It intends to be a celebration of southern living, hence the guns and barbecue. Presumably, grits will be served at breakfast, and Southern Comfort and Bourbon will be available at the after parties.

As far as we know, the $143,000 in donations which can’t be found by the Ubuntu Community Council is still missing. As far as we know, the Ubuntu Community Council still considers Jonathan Riddell, a leading developer in Kubuntu circles, persona non grata for bringing up the issue of missing funds and Canonical’s intellectual property policies. As far as we know, the Kubuntu Council responded with a collective “bite me” to the Ubuntu Community Council in rejecting Riddell’s ouster and standing behind him.

Is this any way to inspect source code? If you already have doubts about the company supplying an application (which you must, if you find the Transparency Center necessary), would you trust it to be honest with you in an environment it completely controls?

I realize that an older Pentium 4 with 1 gig of RAM isn’t gonna spin and shine, bringing out the wow factor right away, but there are most certainly ways to make it better than a dull wallpaper and dreary decorations from Windows 2000. And I will say this again…to many of you this won’t made a bit of difference. But to those of us who introduce Linux to people who have a real interest in using something other than the buggy, crash-prone Windows system? There are a number of things we can do straight out of the gate to get the new Linux user’s attention quickly and in a positive way.

It’s important to note that neither of these are high dollar top-of-the-line laptops requiring deep pockets to buy, but affordable Inspiron 14 3000 Series laptops priced for the rest of us. The laptop announced two weeks ago comes with a 15? screen and sells for somewhere between $250 and $350, depending on the configuration. The laptop announced today, which defaults to slightly lower specs and comes with a smaller 14? screen, is priced at $219 and up.

Mandriva S.A., the French company behind Mandriva, the distribution that long time Linux users will remember as Mandrake, died this week at the age of sixteen. The announcement came in the form of a notice posted by the company earlier this week. The cause of death was financial hemorrhaging.

Nevertheless, the boot comes, of course, with the imprimatur of Mark Shuttleworth himself. Much of this friction stems from a clarification Riddell requested of Canonical’s licensing policies regarding derivative distributions, like — oh, I don’t know, let’s take a wild guess — Kubuntu. Not getting satisfactory answers caused an unfavorable reaction by Riddell which didn’t sit right with some Community Council members.

I might be wrong, but I get the impression that my Windows friends — which would be most of the people I see on a daily basis — think of Linux as this incredibly geeky system from another planet. I think most of them don’t understand why I use it and why I don’t just stay in the known world — which to them would be Windows. Paradoxically, however, they do get why some folks use Macs.

Many of the changes in Fedora 22 come in the Cloud and Server versions, though one change stands out across the board. DNF, an updated package manager that has been around in development since Fedora 18, finally makes its debut here, replacing Yum. DNF provides faster installs and updates while keeping the Yum command-line interface compatibility — but instead of “yum” you’ll be typing “dnf” on the command line. Pretty simple, no?

When the folks at Mint released a new LTS Xfce version (Qiana) in June of last year, followed by another LTS (Rebecca) in January, we didn’t much care. We were more than happy with Maya, and following the age old philosophy of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” we decided to stay the course and keep using what we had until its sunset year arrived. As far as I was concerned, although approaching obsolescence, Maya was damned near perfect. How much better could the latest and greatest be?

I had been showing her around the system on my laptop, noting the impressive number of educational games and applications that are included. Obviously, she wasn’t impressed. She went on to argue that less is more, that all those applications were choking the machine and blocking it from it’s real potential.

This would allow Microsoft to offer its operating system at no cost to OEMs — eliminating the Windows tax. Purchasers of new machines would receive a free year’s subscription to Windows, complete with Windows Cloud Storage and MS Office sub-Basic. Eleven months into use, nag screens appear at boot: “Your Windows subscription will expire in 30 days. Click here to renew.”

Perhaps Microsoft isn’t making as much noise as usual because it’s afraid that if people look too closely, they’ll find that its latest and greatest is like an operating system put together at a Goodwill, with parts borrowed from Android, ChromeOS, GNU/Linux and iOS.

As a greenhorn Linux newbie eight springs ago, I happened upon an article on LXer about this guy in Texas who had an idea on how to promote Linux. Oh, it was a crazy idea all right, but thinking about it at the time, it was one that might…just…work. For the Indianapolis 500 in 2007, the idea — this crazy plan — was to put Linux on the side and nose of a car, and while penguins couldn’t fly, they still could go just over 220 and turn left.

Anomalies. That’s what we are. We, as in those 50 years of age or more who not only know how to use a computer, but who make them do our bidding.

They’ll shut down their software repositories, JIRA and Confluence servers, shared developer infrastructure and mailing lists at the end of May. The foresightlinux.org domain will remain as an informal “alumni association” for an indefinite amount of time, along with the project IRC channels for as long as they are in use.

The majority of us in today’s work force rely on it to earn our livings. Whether we use it directly while sitting in front of a computer or by tallying a daily quota for auditors to further calculate, in one way or another, software is the key to getting our jobs done.

Starting with the simple premise — lost on some FOSS elitists (and you know who you are) — that most Windows XP users are actually people of average intelligence or better, and not digital Neanderthals who need to be shown where the on-button is, the path from Windows XP to Linux is somewhat simple.

“That’s like someone saying their donation can only go to feed the school kids General Mills products for lunches instead of organic, locally grown, real food because its what the well-off donor grew up on and serves to their employees,” he wrote. “Especially now that Apple and Google are such a big part of education, even if it is not FOSS, Microsoft isn’t what kids will be using in the future at work.”