Date: Thu, 14 Apr 2005 19:05:17 +0530 From: Subhro <subhro.kar@gmail.com> To: Brian McCann <bjmccann@gmail.com> Cc: FreeBSD questions <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: India had no FreeBSD mirror sites ?!? Message-ID: <425E7195.7070901@gmail.com> In-Reply-To: <2b5f066d050414055716d3a12a@mail.gmail.com> References: <20050414071958.23388.qmail@web54004.mail.yahoo.com> <425E32A2.1080809@gmail.com> <2b5f066d050414055716d3a12a@mail.gmail.com>
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Brian McCann wrote: > Another suggestion would be talk to a university or other large >school that may be able to afford the bandwidth, or get it at a >discounted rate. Heck, it's added publicity for them and they are >helping the open source community. > > Good idea Brian. But the saddest part is as I have indicated above, Linux rules :-( and FreeBSD is for the heavy duty software professionals. The astonishing fact is that, my ISP BSNL, which is supposed to be the biggest ISP in India does not know how to set up a PPPoE connection on a FBSD box. After I subscribed to my broadband service, which was one month back, tilldate they have not been able to do my setup. They have visited my place more than 10 times and tried to installed RasPPPoE for Linux and kept wondering why it was complaining about unknown ELF type (I didnt have the compatibility layer loaded). I did the setup myself but till date the issue remains open in their problem database :-(. I don't understand why it works out this way but my assumption is, you dont get FreeBSD softwares as easily as Linux. The main sources for software in India is either markets (read pirates) or CDs accompanying computer magazines. And this is a fact that thoes magazines never speak of FreeBSD. Personally I find it much more easier to install FreeBSD than to install any popular public version of Linux like Red Hat, Fedora, Mandrake.... But the FreeBSD installer is definitely not as appealing as the Mandrake installer. For a newbie, pretty looking toolbars with nothing underneath is always more appealing than a text mode installer with loads of information in it. Another example for most modern distribution like SuSe or Fedora is whenever some application dies when it is not supposed to, it tries sending out bug reports and and taking preventive measures. I understand we can simply make a script to watch over the logs and do these neat tricks. But out of the box most applicatipons dont do that. This thing also turns off the newcomer. Best Regards, S.
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