Hi,

I have been trying to a week now to get my dual system to work properly, and I still can't make the 2 systems live happily in the same time zone.

Since I'm dual booting, I'm assuming because of XP I have to set system time to BIOS.

Now, to let Debian know that my system time is not in UTC, I have set in the /etc/defaults/rcS "UTC=no".

Since running "hwclock" on my system seems to fail to this message:
I added HWCLOCKPARS=--directisa to the same file.

I also added the same parameter to these scripts:
/etc/init.d/hwclock.sh
/etc/init.d/hwclockfirst.sh (not sure this one was mandatory ?)

But for some reason running hwclock without manually adding "--directisa" still fails to the same error message.
I don't understand why.

I have properly set my timezone to Europe/Helsinki:
But for some reason the system seems to still think that the time in BIOS is in UTC, even though I have set the UTC=no in rcS

I'm lost here. Any ideas ? This is obviously quite frustrating..


Also NTP has been removed from Lenny, because of some license violations, so I can't just synchronize time from internet either..
But that's another headache

You can still install ntp from sid I believe...

If you compile a new kernel and set "Enhanced Real Time Clock Support" (under Device Drivers --> Character Devices, in xconfig/qconf anyway) as a builtin, not a module, the "waiting for clock tick timed out" error will go away.

I also set my BIOS clock to localtime, and I have UTC=no in /etc/default/rcS, I get this when reconfiguring tzdata:
The difference I guess is that I have Enhanced Real Time Clock as a builtin, but really I'm not sure what's causing your timezone issue.

Is this problem really because the hwclock is failing during the boot ?

I'm just surprised since I'm running pre-compiled kernel, and it's been working fine for me so I haven't seen any reason to recompile my own.. I would imagine they would have noticed this bug there in their ivory towers

What would be a proper way to install something from older branch ?
Disable the testing repository, enabling stable, running apt-get update and then install ntp ?

Thanks for the help!

I don't know for certain that your timezone issue is being caused by hwclock failing, it just seems to be the obvious suspect.

I read about the 'clock tick timed out' fix in a Debian bug report so I'm sure that'll be sorted soon enough.

I'd enable unstable/sid as opposed to stable/etch, apt-get update, and then install ntp. You'll have to specify the release to install from, and it's a good idea to use apt.conf to specify your default release beforehand (so you don't wind up upgrading to sid). Someone actually posted a thread about this very subject the other day. Check out the guide linked there, it covers in detail what I briefly explained aboved.

Hey wedz,

I was just wondering, did you find any way to correct this problem? I am having exactly the same problem with my thinkpad x61s but don't want to use ntp and definetely don't want to upgrade to sid.

Just for the record I am using 2.6.24

Well, I did get it working somehow. I'm not 100% sure what exactly helped in the end.
I hadn't booted to Windows in ages, and after I did and then went back to Linux I noticed that the time was correct without the "Use UTC" in Gnome's time panel.

I'm guessing that somehow the hwclock script started to work properly during boot, and it correctly reads the time from BIOS and adjusts the time.

Check out if you have that HWCLOCKPARS directisa flag set in rcS, and both hwclock scripts. And then check that rcS has that UTC=no.

Hope this helps

Thanks, I have both scripts in place but the HWCLOCKPARS directisa flag set in rcS was enough. Many thanks again.