O.K., what is it with Slack and wrong time. ???.
Seen plenty of threads asking similar. After booting Slack, my clock is 30 minutes slow - and the hardware clock gets reset to this incorrect value.

Yes I have the correct locale set, yes I have re-run timeconfig several times. I'm at UTC+10, and the clock is out by 30 minutes.
*NO* ntpdate is not the solution.

ntpdate is for correcting clock drift, not fixing bad configuration data. Seems like there is an issue here somewhere. This is the only distro I've seen this with - and I've installed plenty in the last couple of months.

As a workaround, I've put ntpdate in rc.local. Hiding the problem, not fixing it

Do you use acpi or apm as power managment and is it a 2.4 kernel or 2.6 ?

Using the kernel as supplied on the install disks - 2.4.29 (??? - guessing, it's at work). That would be base.i I guess.
Will check tomorrow. Same goes for power management - don't know.

Will get a 2.6 kernel built when I can free up some space, then I'll be able to give you definitive answers.

do you have /proc/apm ?

It sounds like your CMOS battery is starting to going bad. I would replace it.

MagicMan

Very unlikely.
Is less than 12 months old, XP has been running since it was bought without incident.
Gentoo has been on it for 6 months, no problem.

As a test yesterday I booted from the CD as I had to move /opt off to a new partition to make some room.
Clock was again off by half an hour.

Has to be something with your machine or your config. I haven't had this problem at all.

O.K. folks, sorry to waste you time.
Apologies to the good ship Slack and all who sail in her.

Laptop was powered down all night.
Doesn't show the symptoms today. Have tried various time zones, and they all work as expected (ntpdate commented out in rc.local).
We actually have a time zone that is half an hour behind the zone I'm in. Looked like that was being used incorrectly.
NO - I didn't use this other zone at any time yesterday. Deliberately didn't, as things looked so suspicious.

Dunno what caused it, unable to reproduce it. ...

Heh - good on yah

And don't you just HATE inconsistent errors, they're
so hard to track down ...


Cheers,
Tink