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