Two things you may want to do:
- Boot XP and get into Control Panel.
- Open Date & Time.
- Make sure your time zone is correct (click the Time Zone tab) and remove the check from the automatically adjust clock for daylight savings. This will prevent XP from slewing the clock when you boot it after a daylight time change (Windows does that sort of thing, this is how you stop it).
- Shut down XP and boot Slackware.
- As root, edit /etc/ntp.conf; make your server list look like this:
Code:
#
# NTP server (list one or more) to synchronize with:
#server pool.ntp.org iburst
server 0.us.pool.ntp.org
server 1.us.pool.ntp.org
server 2.us.pool.ntp.org
If you're not in the US, use the two-character code for your country.
Understand that your hardware clock and your system clock are two separate things; the hardware clock (on your motherboard) is an actual clock chip similar to your wristwatch, it's run by a battery. The system clock is software, run by interrupts in the kernel.
You want to use NTP to keep the system clock on-time. You want to use three pool servers so NTP can evaluate which of those servers is the "best" (meaning the delay, offset and jitter are the lowest available). NTP will switch between servers, selecting the best one, it will also throw out one or more periodically and select a new server if one or more become unavailable, noisy, or poor choices -- it does this without any input from you. Also, if your Internet connection goes away for a while it will synchronize to your local host until the connection comes back and resynchronize to one of the pool servers stepping the system clock back into the correct time.
Now, if NTP was running, stop it with
Code:
/etc/rc.d/rc.ntpd stop
<wait a minute or so>
/etc/rc.d/rc.ntpd start
The daemon should be running and you can exeucte
to see a display like this after about five minutes or so:
Code:
remote refid st t when poll reach delay offset jitter
==============================================================================
127.127.1.0 .LOCL. 10 l 6d 64 0 0.000 0.000 0.000
+64.6.144.6 128.252.19.1 2 u 277 1024 37 629.042 -32.024 42.382
*216.37.64.3 132.163.4.102 2 u 401 1024 377 608.801 -27.456 38.502
+18.85.44.59 18.85.44.61 3 u 555 1024 377 614.653 -22.534 29.600
The plus sign indicates the server you're synchronized with, the asterisks indicate candidate servers, ones that may be used if the synchronized server goes away, becomes noisy or whatever makes it unsuitable.
This all supposes that your time zone is correct when NTP started. Note that
/etc/rc.d/rc.ntpd has an argument that will do large correction to the system clock at boot time (at boot, time is read and initially set from the hardware clock, at shutdown, time is saved from the system clock to the hardware clock). Don't monkey with that.
There is no reason, if you turn off XP's daylight time adjustment as above to not have your hardware clock at UTC (all my servers are UTC and I have absolutely no problems with NTP keeping things on-time).
As others have described above, you can set your hardware clock from your system clock (you could also set it to the correct time UTC in the BIOS if your want to fiddle with that). Just make sure that you have the time configuration set (you may want to run [I]timeconfig/I], choosing UTC and your local time zone in console (without KDE running) or you could choose to set both clock to local time. Either way, NTP will keep your clocks synchronized. Don't monkey with time settings in KDE, it should default to what your system configuration settings are.
You may -- may! -- need to shut down, boot into BIOS and set that clock to close-to-correct wall or UTC time then boot to run level three (console, not KDE) to do these things. If you choose UTC, remember that EST in the US is UTC+5 or whatever your time zone is (it's 0812 EST, 1312 UTC right now here). If you've fiddled with settings in KDE, unfiddle 'em and let the system do its thing for you.
Hope this helps some.
