Thank you Connie for all the years of effort creating what we all enjoy today. I hope your retirement is a time of enjoyment and and comfort. {^_^} Joanne Dow On 2017-02-24 13:52, Bonnie King wrote: > 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! >