[LinuxPPS] Distribution of Choice

[Hal V. Engel]

On Friday 12 June 2009 08:41:42 pm Andrew Hills wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> In your experience, discarding all other qualifications for a Linux
> distribution, which would you choose for a system whose purpose is to
> implement LinuxPPS with NTP? I'm leaning towards Gentoo or Debian, and I
> fear Fedora, but only because of my history with these systems. Ease of
> use is not a primary concern; I'm more focused on reliability.
>
> --Andrew Hills

I am a Gentoo user and have had very few problems with LinuxPPS.  The patches 
apply cleanly to the stock gentoo-sources kernels and the pro-audio overlay 
has the RT sources if you should want to use a real time kernel.  There are 
also ebuilds in bugzilla for a nano patched glibc.  In addition the ntp ebuild 
will build for using reference clocks by setting the parse-clocks use 
variable.

I am currently using rt-sources-2.6.26.8-r12 (hand modified for the 
convergence issue) for my kernel and the 2.6.26 LinuxPPS patch set applies and 
builds cleanly.  I am also using one of the buzilla glibc ebuild and the off 
the self ntp ebuild with USE=parse-clocks.

In addition, I have UDEV setup to correctly setup my serial port and the sym-
links for the devices needed by my driver as well as having a custom init 
script for starting ntp correctly for my refclock.  All of this is very 
straight forward to setup on a Gentoo box.

There are more Gentoo users here so you will not be alone.  My box is very 
stable.  If you otherwise feel comfortable with Gentoo then you can rest 
assured that adding LinuxPPS into the mix is not an issue.

Hal