I'm getting tired of this thing, whenever I restart my box the clock just gets to other year and a completely different hour. The funny thing is that it used to work right with Mandrake 9.1 and Windows XP but now that I unistalled Mandrake and installed Gentoo 1.4 from stage 2 , following all the instructions including the symlink from /etc/localtime to /usr/share/zoneinfo/US/Central and it keeps doing the same thing. I've changed the time in the Bios and it keeps doing the same thing, I've changed the time from windows and it keeps doing the same thing, and finally I did set the time with gentoo and just do it again. I even erased the symlink and its the same thing Does anyone see anything something I'm doing wrong or anything I forget to do??

i ditto but what i personaly do is setup an NTP thing which connects to a time server and updates your pc time, it works great, my clock is right on target 3:20 accounting to redhat clock server 1 & 2

works great and it might be a solution to your problem but anyway usualy when clocks start to fuck up in the bios that means the bios battery is beguning to die and u gotta to put in new one.

this only happen on like when u shut down and start up the machine or is it on 24/7 if its 24/7 then i ditto but that connecting to clock server might be a good idea.

I aready installed the ntp daemon but still is not working in my computer I hae tried to conect to a server but It never works the time never gets updated. Can you show me you configuration file??

Hm. It might actually be that the bios battery has gone on the system board. If the time doesn't stick in the bios, (if I can interperet what you are saying correctly) it is prolly the battery needs replacement..

Battery sounds suspect to me..

I wrote a simple perl script to update my system time and bios time from within linux.

Grabs the time from the US Naval observatory atomic clock.

need perl and lynx installed.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w


##This program fetches the time from the USNO and sets my linux machine to it.
##################################################################
@q = `lynx "http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/cgi-bin/timer.pl" -dump `;

$time = $q[4];
print $time;
$time =~ s/\,//g;
$time =~ s/\.//g;
$time =~ s/Eastern daylight time//i;
$time =~ s/Eastern standard time//i;

#Set Linux time
`date -s \"$time\"`;
#Set BIOS time
`hwclock --systohc`;

will this work if I use the US central time?

Is it always off by the same amount?

you need to set the hardware clock for the time to be saved, I'm not sure if gentoo does this or not.


hwclock --set --date=9/30/03 22:45:00

No sometimes is just some minutes, them some years, and all by itself just goes to other time without any pattern. Yes Gentoo does save the time to the bios by default
but thanks for the reply

I am not an expert, however, I had an almost exact experience over the past 10 months and my only problem was not affording a qualified computer specialist to thoroughly examine my computer. As such, my computer seemed to totally shut down 3 times (once every 2 to 3 months) and then after a day or two it would function again. However, it happened again 3 weeks ago and would not work at all anymore.

Here is the interesting and still somewhat strange part that has to do with the time. For a couple weeks to 3 days (in that descending order) my computer would start to have the wrong time which also varied from hours to years (it never really seemed to have a pattern).

I am most certainly not saying the problem I had is exactly what your computer is suffering from, but if you are able to have the motherboard examined by a qualified computer specialist you should do so. In the end, I was still not able to find anyone who was qualified to do any kind of actual work on the motherboard (at least not for very little money). I was able to find out that my processor, bios and the bios battery were perfectly fine for free, but the motherboard was not functioning anymore.

As I said, I am not really an expert, but from this years experience it sounds like your motherboard is giving you warning signals of an impending death if whatever the probem is is not fixed (if it is at all affordably fixable).

Try this..
Go into your BIOs and "load failsafe defaults". See what happens.

The perl script could work for central time, just modify the script to subtract 1 hour from the hour variable before setting your clock to it. If you need help, let me know.

I think I solve it just by deleting the file /etc/adjtime, I don't know what this file is for but when I deleted it started working right after a reboot. I just have to wait untile I get out of school to see if it will still working. Can someone explain to me what the this file is for???