LXer Weekly Roundup for 17-Apr-2011

LXer Feature: 18-Apr-2011 Forgive my lateness once again in getting the LXWR out to you, I am out of town and working from a family member's Mac..how does anyone get anything done on these things? No keyboard shortcuts, no right clicking, safari sucks and of course I forgot my mouse! I need some Mac lessons methinks.. Enjoy!

Do I Have Bad Karma for Debian?: Do I have bad karma to run Debian? I have 6 posts about Debian so far, and only one of them relates to full success, where I was able to run a full-power Debian on my laptop. Maybe I myself and Debian are just creatures of different worlds and we cannot live together?

25 things you can do with VLC!: VLC is beyond doubts the most popular open source, cross-platform media player and multi-media framework written by VideoLAN projects. VLC player is small in size, just about 17 Mb and immensely powerful! In this post we will explore the player and list 25+ things you can do with VLC player.

A Substitute Remote Control: A long-standing task for the Linux kernel has been the removal of the Big Kernel Lock, and it looks like version 2.6.39 will achieve that goal. However, user-space applications which use information about the BKL are now failing to build or run, including the Linux Infrared Remote Control project. Naturally, this gave me an itch, and I wanted to scratch it.

Gavin King unveils Red Hat's top secret Java Killer/Successor: The Ceylon Project : Gavin King of Red Hat/Hibernate/Seam fame recently unveiled the top secret project that he has been working on over the past two years, a new language and SDK designed to replace Java in the enterprise. The project came out of hiding without much fanfare or publicity at QCon Beijing in a keynote titled "The Ceylon Project - the next generation of Java language?"

Groklaw: the good, the bad, the ugly: The website Groklaw, which waged a tireless campaign against the SCO Group after it filed a case against IBM in 2003, for "misappropriation of trade secrets, tortious interference, unfair competition and breach of contract, has decided it is time to put up the shutters.

Zorin PC Launched Aims to Grow Linux Popularity: According to Zorin, its PC has a rotatable touch screen display which is optimized for electronic note taking and drawing. Zorin also notes it has tailored both the hardware and software to work 100% with Linux and is available in three editions: the Home Edition for general use, the Educational edition and the Business edition. More information about Zorin and its OS and PC can be found on the newly launched Zorin PC website.

Optimizing Your Development Process: Sometimes, you need to take a step back and analyze your development process. You can draw from the agile methodology without necessarily going all in on it and you can find ways to maximize your talent and resources and keep product development moving forward with some techniques described in this post.

Torvalds Honored by Gaggle of Lawyers: Linus Torvalds, the father of Linux and hero to many Open Source users, might not be the first person one might think would be honored by an organization of lawyers, but that's exactly what's happening. The International Technology Law Association will award Torvalds its ITechLaw Achievement Award at their upcoming 40th anniversary celebration.

How To Re-Enable The Notification Area (Systray) In Ubuntu 11.04, For All Applications: Unity got its notification area (called Systray by the Ubuntu developers) back a while ago, but only for a few applications: Java apps, Mumble, Wine applications, Skype, and hp-systray. But there's an easy way to either re-enable the Systray for all applications or to whitelist a few applications you can't live without. Read on!