Hi (again). I've been having trouble ever since my last install trying to get my system to keep track of time. Right now it's 1255 local time (EST) but my kde clock says "new york 7:55am" I went into "adjust date and time" and THAT window says the current time is 1255, but also says current timezone is UTC. This despite the fact that the drop down timezone menu is set to new york. It seems that the computer is reading the time from the bios and interpreting that as UTC. I think I told the installer that system time was not utc, but since it's confused (or I messed up) is there a way to "remind" it? Also, I don't know if this is relevent since the minutes of time are right, but whenever I boot up or shut down, I see a message saying something like "error setting system clock from hardware. /dev/rtc wait for tick timed out"
Any ideas much appreciated!

One thing you could do is to install the ntpdate deb package. This will go out and query an NTP server and set the time for you.

Another thing you could do (I guess) is to set the hardware clock to the proper time using the hwclock command.

apart from seting the hardware clock to proper time in your bios, maybe if the computer is a little old the battery on your mother board has run flat. Check it because if that is the case all your bios setting wouldn't be remembered either as the battery keeps the cmos working as well.

The computer's only a year old, and the clock is consistently off by 5 hours to the minute. I think I'll try setting the hardware clock to UTC (since that's what debian thinks it is) and just tell Windows to get used to it

I've experimented with ntp, but I'm on a campus network and either the time responses are blocked or we've got too much lag for it to be at all accurate

Thanks for the tips guys.

Easiest way to set your clock is to use Rdate. There is no configuration required. To do it manually you would open a terminal and issue a command similar to the following:

# rdate -s time.iastate.edu

You can create a simple script to run at boot if you want the time set on each startup, and/or make an hourly cronjob to continue syncing with the correct time while your system is running. Just be sure you have your TZ set properly.

unfortunately rdate seems to time out trying to find a server (quite possible given my experience of the latency of the internet conn. here :-(
When I set the BIOS clock to utc, linux was happy and displayed the correct time and timezone. Alas, as is often hte case WIndows screwed everything up. AFter booting into windows I think it "fixed" the bios time... So for the time being I've just set my timezone to London (which results in the "raw" clock time being displayed) If anyone knows how to configure debian to accept that the bios is NOT set to utc, I'd be interested to know, but for now I guess I'll have to live w/it. (another reason to ditch my windows installation entirely.....)

Thanks for your suggestions guys, unfortunately my network situation makes the ntp fix (which looks quite appealing) unworkable.