I have seen a recent thread about the clock drift issue in Scientific Linux 5 (SL5) and would like to share my thoughts.
I have had issues with clock drift running SL5 in a Virtualbox environment (Windows host, SL5 guest) ever since I installed SL5. I would madly reinstall the guest tools, change the kernel boot parameters, and the issue would go away. For a while. But, inevitably, the time drift problem came back. I did some more research and saw this bug report: http://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/3135 After trying all of the possible kernel boot parameters, with no luck improving things, I finally thre in the towel and set up a crontab to update the clock via NTP once a minute (which would be about two minutes of real time in the guest). This was not a real solution, so I ended up spending over eight hours upgrading my system to SL6 (I tried and failed to "upgrade", and had to do a fresh install of SL6 then transfer files over form the SL5 system; I also discovered the hard way one needs to give a SL6 VM guest 512 megs of memory to do a graphical install, which I needed to install a working system). One Linux user has told me that the SL5 clock slew problem only happens when the host is a Windows host. Another thing: Yes, upstream is deprecating aspell, but if SL6 is going to have an aspell package, it makes sense to also give it packages for all of the dictionaries, even if they are unofficial add-ons. If the intention is to upgrade to hunspell, "aspell" should be a symlink to hunspell (just as "ispell" is a symlink to aspell), so that "aspell -c" and "aspell -a" do the right thing. - Sam
