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" <pwil...@aslenv.com> 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
