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.
