India had no FreeBSD mirror sites ?!?

[Anthony Atkielski]

Subhro writes:

> Good idea Brian. But the saddest part is as I have indicated above,
> Linux rules :-( and FreeBSD is for the heavy duty software 
> professionals.

Starting burning some CDs and handing them out, and maybe that will
change (eventually). FreeBSD is real UN*X (except for the trademark),
and it should whip Linux as a server without any difficulty. So if there
are organizations in India that want to set up servers at little or no
cost, FreeBSD is their wish come true. And FreeBSD skills are
transferable to other UNIX operating systems more directly than Linux
skills, which are becoming increasingly specific to that community.

> 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.

Odd that they so readily deal in pirated software, but they so rarely
speak of software that is already free to begin with!

> 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.

Skip the newbies and introduce IT professionals to FreeBSD.  Tell your
ISP about it--I daresay they could find a great many uses for a reliable
UN*X server, especially when the software is free.  It's got to be
better than Red Hat, which is what they apparently run now.

> 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.

Most of the 35,481,847 Linux distributions available this week target
the desktop, although none of them can hold a candle Windows in this
respect.  They are thus solutions looking for problems, since anyone who
wants a real desktop will run Windows, and since Linux fans often seem
unable to see their favorite distributions in a serious server role.  So
you get all the junk one might expect with a wannabe Windows OS, and
none of the basic simplicity you need with a server.

If you want a desktop ---> install Windows (or a Mac).
If you want a server ---> install FreeBSD.
If you want religion ---> install Linux.

-- 
Anthony