Howto

It seems a lot of children's educational shows have been posted to YouTube. It isn't up to me to decide if them being there is a violation of someone's trademarks or copyrights. If they are there, I can use youtube-dl to download them.

Want "Magic School Bus" season 1? Many distros provide a package named youtube-dl. I went to wikipedia and looked up the Magic School Bus episode titles for season 1 and then I searched for those on YouTube. Then I made a text file and put in the URLs like so:

youtube-dl -f 43 -t 'http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBp68rhT_Sg'
youtube-dl -f 43 -t 'http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkqSapSsLvc'
youtube-dl -f 43 -t 'http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BeV7BtP18N8'
youtube-dl -f 43 -t 'http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tCXnvTnzZc'
youtube-dl -f 43 -t 'http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaf59CuWFuQ'
youtube-dl -f 43 -t 'http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Z91RU4wBm8'
youtube-dl -f 43 -t 'http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idEEIXsqPYA'
youtube-dl -f 43 -t 'http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmuMh0FavfE'
youtube-dl -f 43 -t 'http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mIxsGlNhhc'
youtube-dl -f 43 -t 'http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=670eR6_UOFA'
youtube-dl -f 43 -t 'http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOKB6B6ROZE'
youtube-dl -f 43 -t 'http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ta34lJ_G54A'
youtube-dl -f 43 -t 'http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFV5Y9ljyBg'

Don't forget to chmod 755 that text file and then you can run it from the commandline. I hope you have some disk space. Each episode is about 130 MB or so. You'll get the webm flavor. Most everything on YouTube is available in several flavors including webm.

I haven't looked for all of the other episodes yet but will soon. You can also find a lot of episodes of PBS' Arthur show. My 6 year old really likes that one.

The quality of these videos is not really that great when played back on a computer monitor with high resolution or an HD TV... but playing them on my Nintendo Wii (with Homebrew's WiiMC application over a samba share) on a standard def. TV, they look just as good as anything else. We do not yet own an HD TV.

youtube-dl is a fantastic program and it can even download complete YouTube channels and/or playlists.

There have been a few occasions where I have wanted to install CentOS on a remote machine that already had a working flavor of Linux on it. Luckily RHEL / CentOS has a way to do this.

Basic Steps

1. Download the PXE CentOS kernel and initrd image
2. Configure the bootloader to boot the CentOS kernel by default
3. Configure the bootloader with extra parameters for networking and remote VNC
4. Reboot the machine
5. Run the vncviewer in listen mode with port 5500 accessible

A co-worker of mine inspired me to create a new enterprise CD with SP3 pre-installed the other day after I asked about an existing iso I had found on our network. I wondered if it were OEM or a new volume license with SP3 I had hoped it was.

He sent me a few links to some howto's and not all were the same. Looking over a few examples I quickly began replacing their Windows solutions with known Linux. Rather than recreate the wheel, I first searched how others have done it using Linux. These are a couple sites that have inspired my success:

• Slipstreaming Windows XP with Service Pack 3 in Linux by Jeremy Visser

• Slipstreaming Windows XP SP3 in Linux by Michael Gorven
• Intégration du Service Pack Windows sous Linux by Jacques Rouxel

Introduction - Why Macs?

I work as a System Administrator for a Computer Science Department and as a result I manage both server machines and lab machines. Some time ago the department decided (and I was in agreement) that it would be a good idea to offer the students additional variety in the computer lab by replacing some of the "Pee Cee" machines in the main undergrad lab with some Apple Macintosh systems. This would give students access to Mac OS X (pronounced "ten") in the lab in addition to Linux and Microsoft Windows.

Although Apple switched to Intel-based machines a few years ago, you can't just run their OS on any Intel/AMD machine as they have both licensing reasons and technical reasons why their OS should ONLY run on Apple hardware. They don't seem to be friendly to running Mac OS X inside of Virtualization either. Mr. Jobs, why do you hate us? I digress.

The first three years we had Macs in the lab they only ran Mac OS X and as time passed, fewer and fewer people used them. The usage slowdown was caused by a number of reasons that I'll not go into here. This year though, I decided not to give up on the Macs and to make them triple-boot... so if people don't want to use Mac OS X they don't have to, and the machines can get better utilization.

I wrote up a HOWTO for the CentOS wiki entitled, Installing and using OpenVZ on CentOS 5, and thought I would share it here as well.

Please note that the OpenVZ kernel is a product of the OpenVZ Project 
and is NOT supported by CentOS. The OpenVZ Project follows the RHEL 
kernels closely and provides updates in a somewhat timely fashion 
after updated Red Hat (and CentOS) kernels are released. As a result 
the RHEL-based OpenVZ kernels are well suited for use on RHEL and 
CentOS hosts with support for (almost) all of the same hardware. 
Please note though that the OpenVZ kernel is less modular than the 
stock Red Hat / CentOS kernels with some hardware support being 
compiled in. 

It is recommended you read this HOWTO in its entirety before 
attempting any of the operations shown in it.

What is OpenVZ?

OpenVZ is operating system-level virtualization based on a modified Linux kernel that allows a physical server to run multiple isolated instances known as containers, virtual private servers (VPS), or virtual environments (VE). The preferred term these days is container. Containers are sometimes compared to chroot or jail type environments but containers are really much better in terms of isolation, security, functionality, and resource management.

OpenVZ consists of a custom Linux kernel (available from the OpenVZ Project) and some user-level tools. OpenVZ is very portable, does not rely on VT support in the CPU, and as a result it is available for a number of CPU families including x86, x86-64, IA-64, PowerPC and SPARC.

OS-level virtualization is quite different from machine / hardware virtualization products such as VMware Server, Parallels Workstation, VirtualBox, QEMU, KVM, and Xen in that with OpenVZ you can only do Linux on Linux virtualization.

OpenVZ modifies the Linux kernel to add advanced containerization features which allow for isolated groups of processes under a parent init along with about twenty dynamic resource management parameters for controlling container resource usage. The OpenVZ Project maintains three stable kernel branches:

1. RHEL4 / CentOS4 2.6.9 based
2. RHEL5 / CentOS 5 2.6.18 based
3. Vanilla 2.6.18 based

There are a number of unstable branches based on newer versions of the Linux kernel that may eventually reach stable status.

I have done this many times following various instructions when installing perl modules but for the most part they all tell you to:

download > extract > cd into extracted dir
perl Makefile.PL
make
make install

I remember there was an easier way that went out and fulfilled all dependencies but I could never remember because I just followed the README file. Today I read a post where at least a couple folks gave the same instructions I recalled using:

perl -MCPAN -e shell
install modulename

Much easier!

UPDATE: