Regarding DVD/CD request

[Chris]

On Feb 28, 2009, at 12:49 AM, RAMASUBRAMANIAN VENKITESWARAN wrote:

> Sir/Madam,
>                     I am a student studying in an Indian  University.I
> recently heard of  FREE BSD Operating system.To have a try on the  
> Operating
> system I tried to download it.But,I could not download the Operating
> system,since it is bulky.Can you send DVD/CDs of Free BSD by mail?
> Please Reply.
> __________________

Yes, it is "bulky" for some of us. Not as bulky as an uncontrolled
auto update from Apple or Microsoft but still bulky. Dial-up is most
likely impractical and satellite risky. One has to presume that you
need nearly the entire installation and whether you download the
small disk and then add other installations or just download
the entire disk one, you still end up using more bandwidth than
a satellite connection wants to give you within a 24 hour period.

On some satellite ISPs, it's practically "impossible" to get FreeBSD
downloaded if you have much other additional communication
present on your connection. I have gone through the pain of using
ftp reget to download 200MB per day to get a new complete
installation CD. This avoids overrunning your quota but if you forget
it's running, the provider will shut you down for the day and most
likely when throttled, your download will eventually fail (at least
with Hughes, communications become unreliable when they throttle
your connections). You may extend the throttled time out for days
if you leave the download running after they apply the limits.

A good approach is to purchase the CD from FreeBSD Mall or
one of the places shown on the

http://www.freebsd.org/where.html

page. I have done this before and it takes "about" the same amount
of time for shipping as screwing around with reget within FTP. It
also supports FreeBSD.

Once you have this CD, you install and then immediately set up your
cvsup to upgrade the sources with whatever has changed since the
CD was made and then rebuild the world as shown in the
Handbook. Upgrading the sources and ports from your base CD
may take a day depending on your hardware but I've never blown
my quota doing it this way (versus forgetting I have the ftp running
trying to download an installation disk).

 From then on, you just keep cvsup'ing across major and minor
releases and bandwidth throttles aren't an issue if you are careful.
Major releases will obviously use more bandwidth but it's not been
bad with cvsup. I've done several upgrades from 5 to 6, 6 to 7 etc
all on the satellite without blowing my "fair" use policy. By contrast,
I can't do one Apple upgrade for 10.5, it's quite hopeless at 675
unregulated MBs.

If you use a large number of large ports the experience might be
different. I don't use X windows and I would bet those downloads
are nasty during port upgrades. I know of no solution for that if
you are saddled with an unreliable ISP.

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