I recently installed Elive (2.6.18-elive #2 SMP PREEMPT Sat Jan 6 00:41:56) and the only real issue I have is that the time is out. I set the correct time zone on install (Africa, Johannesburg) but the displayed time (gdesklets/bash prompt,etc) is 2 hours ahead of current time. I checked the CMOS time on bootup and set that correctly. The only way I get the time correct to is to select an incorrect timezone. If I use the correct timezone and set the time correctly, then my Ubuntu/CMOS shows the incorrect time (2 hours out). Any ideas?

P.S. Elive is 'unstable', which could be a reason?

I'm Having a great time with Enlightenment otherwise - quite impressive is E17, and a whole lot prettier than KDE or Gnome Found the distro on recent LinuxFormat magazine DVD.

Haven't used elive (or ubuntu for that matter) but:

Timezone files in Linux are typically in /usr/share/zoneinfo.

The default timezone is usually /etc/localtime (this can be a copy of or a link to one of the files in /usr/share/zoneinfo).
You can check for whether this is a symbolic link simply by doing an "ls -l /etc/localtime". If an slink it will show to which file it is linked. If it is not an slink doing "cksum /etc/localtime" and "cksum usr/share/zoneinfo/Africa/Johannesburg" would help. If they have the same cksum then you know /etc/localtime is a copy of what you think.

You can find out what is in a zoneinfo file by running "zdump <zonefile>". The zoneinfo files change on occasion (as for example this year most of the ones for America changed due to earlier start and later end of daylight saving time). If you're running a 2.6 kernel and elive uses standards it likely has up to date zoneinfo files but it never hurts to check.

Additionally there is a TZ variable that can be set that will override the default timezone. After you login type "echo $TZ" to see if this is set. If it is you'd need to examine startup files (/etc/profile, /etc/bashrc, $HOME/.profile, $HOME/.bashrc) to see if any of them are setting the value.

Finally:
date = system time
hwclock = hardware clock time

Once you've set the date/time using the date command (and verified you have the right timezone) use hwclock --systohc to set the hwclock to have same underlying time as the system. Note that the system ALWAYS stores time as UTC - timezone setting affects how you see the time but the underlying time is actually UTC.