Didn't plan on chiming in but Larry's post tugged.
I started with Slackware in '93, kernel 1.3, looking for an cheap X11
workstation alternative to the then $15k a pop SunOS workstations, of which we
could only afford 2. I proposed to my division director to let me buy 12
Pentium 90's at $2k a pop to deploy this new thing called a linux workstation. I
recall a committee of two, one from our scientific computing division, who
advised against it, saying there was no vendor backing. Lucky for me, my
division director took a chance. Well, the rest, they say, is history.
Like Larry I switched to RedHat when they came in boxes. I stumbled on SL when I
started working on ROOT. Version 0.6 then. There was this thing called
FermiLinux and when Redhat stopped selling boxes and wanted a subscription for
RHEL, I switched us over to SL.
Remember Connie's photos when SL started installing?
The SL mailing list is fantastic resource. I suspect like all good things it
will also come to an end. I hope it lasts a little longer, at least till I
retire, so we can all bitch about CentOS 8 and commiserate together the loss of
SL. Lol.
On 2/25/20 1:56 PM, P. Larry Nelson wrote:
> Brett Viren wrote on 2/25/20 8:15 AM:
>> "Peter Willis" <[log in to unmask]> writes:
>>
>>> Perhaps, if it’s not too much trouble, people on the list might give a short
>>> blurb about
>>> how they use it and why.
>
> Not quite a short blurb, but not too long either.
>
> I am retired now (nearly 4 years) after nearly 50 years in the IT biz - 44 of
> those at UIUC and 20 of those as an IT Admin for our local HEP group, and I can
> tell you that there are two people who made my life immeasurably better. So I
> just want to toot their horn.
>
> Troy Dawson and Connie Sieh of FermiLab. Here's a great interview with Troy
> that will answer a lot of questions as well as elucidate why we went with SL.
> (I suspect the following will get transmogrified by Fermi's Proof Point URL
> secret encoder ring)
>
> https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__old.montanalinux.org_interview-2Dtroy-2Ddawson-2Dscientific-2Dlinux-2Djune2011.html&d=DwIDaQ&c=gRgGjJ3BkIsb5y6s49QqsA&r=gd8BzeSQcySVxr0gDWSEbN-P-pgDXkdyCtaMqdCgPPdW1cyL5RIpaIYrCn8C5x2A&m=p76IJCxmwsNBSv-yK1gjd90aDixiH0QGmAOt17f6Gf0&s=_1X0fjomFwROuoTUSK43cCqxlIRTvLj6oFiyBnixFAE&e=
>
> Alas, much to my initial dismay, Troy announced in 2011 he was going to work for
> RedHat, but Pat Riehecky jumped in to those big shoes (Thanks Pat!). I would be
> remiss if I didn't also mention Urs Beyerle and his work on the SL Live
> CDs/DVDs. And, of course, the (then) smallish but amazingly helpful SL user
> community on this list.
>
> After infuriatingly frustrating and hapless encounters with RHEL support on even
> the simplest of issues, being able to have one-on-one interactions with Troy,
> Connie, and Urs (and other users on the list) was like stepping out of a cold
> dark cave onto a warm sun drenched beach. [not hyperbole]
>
> Our journey (in case you're interested and still reading) went something like:
>
> Late 90's and early 2000's - SunOS (expensive hardware, expensive maintenance
> contracts, expensive licensing). Start playing with this new toy Redhat 2.0.
> (spare desktop hardware, almost free software, no licensing). Then Redhat 3,
> then 4 - now seeing that we can replicate all services from SunOS to RH.
> No longer a toy. Then RH 5 and 6, 7. 8, 9 and End-of-Life. LHC was ramping up
> and about to spew petabytes of ATLAS experiment data. Time to start building
> racks of storage farms and compute clusters. Switch to RHEL. But with that
> came confusing and frustrating licensing plus the aforementioned support snafus.
>
> Then an epiphany - one of our engineers was collaborating with another
> institution on loading linux onto embedded processors as part of the Dark Energy
> Survey telescope and came to me for linux advice. They were using a free linux
> installation from CERN called Scientific Linux (SLC). "Really!" He said
> FermiLab had a similar version (SLF) but that they chose SLC for whatever
> reason. He said it's the same as RHEL. "Really!" (again) I found FermiLab's
> website for SLF and the rest, they say, is history!
>
> We started with RHEL3, moved to SL4, then SL5 (my favorite) and wound up at SL6.
> SL7 was out and the HEP community was transitioning to it when I retired so I
> didn't have to deal with it. :-)
>
> Anyways, now back to retirement.
> - Larry
>
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