How to fix clock on Slackware / Slackware and
this old incorrect BIOS time troubles
There two main reasons which cause incorrect clock settings on
Slackware Linux.
One common reason for incorrectly set time is improper clock and
timezone settings during Slackware install.
On install, one of the ncruses install menus asks an ambigious
dialog question reading
HARDWARE CLOCK SET TO UTC?
Is the hardware clock set to Coordinated Universal Time
(UTC/GMT)?
Some newbie Slackware users make the mistake to choose
YES
here, resulting in incorrectly set clock.
Second possibility for improper time is incorrect time on
BIOS level. This is not so common among laptop and modern
desktop PCs. However in the past impoper system BIOS hardware clock
was usual.
In any case it is a good practice to check the system
PC
BIOS clock settings.
To check BIOS battery hardware clock from command line use:
bash-4.1# hwclock --show
Fri 24 Feb 2012 01:24:18 AM EET -0.469279
seconds
The system clock on
Slackware is set via a script called
timeconfig. To fix slack's incorrect host time run:
bash-4.1# timeconfig
Running
timeconfig once should configure a proper timezone
to be set on next system reboot, however the system time will
probably still be not ok.
To manually set time to right time, use
date command. To set
manually the system wide time to
12:00:00 with date:
bash-4.1# date -s "12:00:00"
Anyways for time accuracy the
ntpdate should be used to feth
time from NTP internet time server:
bash-4.1# ntpdate time.nist.gov
...
Finally to make the new set right time permanent also for the BIOS
battery clock issue:
bash-4.1# hwclock --systohc
By the way its curious fact
Slackware Linux is the oldest still
existent GNU / Linux based distribution. Its up and running
since the very day GNU and Linux came to merge at one Free OS
;)