I/O error when booting Linux-on-USB through Virtualbox on Windows 7

This article provides remedy (in particular the setting to remove the read-only attribute).

Interesting Linux distributions

- elementary OS - looks very clean and seems to be suitable for weaker PCs (1 GB RAM, 15 GB disk space)
- Kubuntu 15.04 with Plasma 5 desktop - beautiful UI; for more powerful PCs

Finding Type 3 fonts in PDFs

It can be painful to fail the IEEE PDF check because of wrong fonts that made it into your PDF file. Here's a little shell script that helps to locate where Type 3 fonts are hiding.

#!/bin/bash

 for i in `seq 1 1 \`pdfinfo XXX.pdf|grep 'Pages'|cut -d: -f2|sed -e 's/ //g'\``
 do
   echo ""
   echo Page $i;
   echo "font name                            type              emb sub uni object ID"
   echo ------------------------------------ ----------------- --- --- --- ---------
   pdffonts -f $i -l $i XXX.pdf|grep 'Type 3';
 done

Multiple desktops in Windows 7

This small tool from Microsoft allows you to have 4 virtual desktops. There are also several alternatives out there in the open source world for more (and more flexible) virtual desktops.

Updating grub in Ubuntu

The best link I found:

http://askubuntu.com/questions/156700/how-to-set-default-boot-kernel-in-ubuntu-grub

Eclipse startup error with TFS plugin

Sometimes Eclipse will produce the dull error message "An error has occurred. See the log file...". On my system this is caused by the TFS plugin misbehaving. 

An easy way to recover this is to navigate to the directory ${workspace}\.metadata\.plugins\org.eclipse.core.resources and delete the file .snap.

Windows - find processes that have a file locked

The tool Process Explorer can help ("Find/Handle or DLL substring")
http://www.heise.de/download/process-explorer.html