India had no FreeBSD mirror sites ?!?

[Subhro]

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.