Hi,
just wanted to say a huge thanks. We all benefited hugely from your work
and work of a whole SL team.
Hope You still have a many happy roads open for You in the future :-).
cheers!
On 02/24/2017 10:52 PM, 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!
