I thank several correspondents for the historical as well as engineering 
insights into why TUV EL is used over SuSE Enterprise.  As for the 
suggestion that this sort of question belongs on an enthusiast list -- I 
have found very few enthusiasts who can provide the engineering basis 
for a decision.

I take it that I am correct in one regard:  there is no CentOS 
equivalent using SuSE Enterprise as TUV? (CentOS as I understand the 
situation does not have paid professional developers, unlike SL or the 
Princeton distributions, but relies upon volunteers, many of whom are in 
fact computer programming professionals.)  I have not found one.

Yasha Karant

On 03/21/2013 10:23 AM, Konstantin Olchanski wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 21, 2013 at 01:51:33AM -0400, S.Tindall wrote:
>> On Wed, 2013-03-20 at 21:11 -0700, Yasha Karant wrote:
>>>
>>> why did SL -- ... -- select to use the present TUV instead of SuSE enterprise ...
>>
>> You're right, it is a silly question. Or is Google broken again?
>>
>> https://www.scientificlinux.org/documentation/faq/general1
>>
>
>
> The link does not really answer the question, or only answers the FermiLab side of it.
>
>  From the Brookhaven Lab (and TRIUMF) side, this "selection" happened very early on.
>
> We have settled on Red Hat Linux (without and well before the "E" and TUV nonsense)
> fairly quickly around the time the first dual and quad Pentium Pro machines
> came out. This must have been around 1998 time frame.
>
> These dual and quad Pentium Pro machines were clocked at around 200 MHz and
> cost a fraction of our massive Silicon Graphics UNIX (IRIX) machines, had about the same
> CPU performance for our physics applications, but with more RAM and with the 100Mbit ethernet.
> Stability was about the same as the SGI machines.
>
> So obviously, we switched from IRIX to Linux as quickly as we could port our software
> to run on Linux (porting from 64-bit IRIX to 32-bit Linux, how is that for progress?)
>
> Why Red Hat? There were other contenders at the time. We certainly had Debian proponents in house.
> I think the Red Hat "graphical" installer and the "kickstart" function were the main
> deal makers.
>
> Once selected, we stayed with Red Hat Linux and in a way we still are with it.
>
> Somewhere along the line came the split into Fedora, TUV "E" Linux, SL/SLC Linux, CentoOS, etc
>
> Some people are not aware of the history from before this split
> and think that that was the beginning of history. For us it was just one more
> bump on the road.
>
> P.S. From the CERN side, I know the story is different yet again. Maybe Alan Silverman
> will write it up in a book some day.
>
>