Friends,

The Scientific Linux team is at once happy and sad to announce Connie 
Sieh's retirement after 23 years. Today is her last full-time day at 
Fermilab.

Connie Sieh founded the Fermi Linux and Scientific Linux projects and 
has worked on them continuously. She has sometimes preferred to toil 
behind the scenes and leave public announcements to others, but has 
always been a driving force behind the projects.

The Scientific Linux story started in the late 1990s when Connie's group 
explored using commodity PC hardware and Linux as an alternative to 
commercial servers with proprietary UNIX operating systems. From the 
distributions available at the time, Red Hat Linux was chosen.

In 1998, Connie announced Fermi Linux at HEPiX, a semi-annual meeting of 
High Energy Physics IT staff. Fermi Linux was a customized and 
re-branded version of Red Hat Linux with some tweaks for integration 
with the Fermilab environment. It also introduced an installer 
modification called Workgroups, a framework to customize package sets 
for use at different sites and for different purposes. The Workgroups 
concept lives on today in the form of Contexts for SL7.

In October 2003 TUV changed their product model and introduced Red Hat 
Enterprise Linux. Enterprise Linux was no longer freely distributed in 
binary form, but sources remained available.

Connie and her colleagues started building from these sources, creating 
one of the first Enterprise Linux rebuilds. A preview, dubbed HEPL, was 
presented at spring HEPiX 2004. In May 2004, the rebuild was released as 
Scientific Linux. The name was chosen to reflect the goals and user base 
of the product.

Our colleagues at CERN collaborated, customizing and using Scientific 
Linux as Scientific Linux CERN (SLC). SL became a standard OS for 
Scientific Computing in High Energy Physics at Fermilab, CERN and beyond.

SL is freely available to the general public, and is a popular 
Enterprise Linux rebuild. As a result, it has built a community outside 
of Fermilab and HEP.

With gratitude, the Scientific Linux team would like to recognize 
Connie's many years of service and her immense contribution to the 
project she founded.

Connie's outstanding technical and non-technical judgement are the 
foundation of Scientific Linux. Her legacy will continue to inform the 
way we run SL and we hope she'll remain as a collaborator.

All the best to Connie in her well-earned retirement. She will be dearly 
missed!

-- 
Bonnie King
Group Leader
Scientific Linux & Architecture Management

Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory
www.fnal.gov