Bill Wisse wrote:
How is your hardware clock set? YaST, System, Select Time Zone. Local time or UTC?
It is set to Local time
worng
IF you boot to other OS's on this machine it is strongly recommend setting it to local.
I only have SuSE. Are you suggesting I should change to UTC?
The Right Thing (TM) would be to set it to UTC and also set the time zone corectly. Local time is for braindead OS which cannot compute, so if you would have windows and linux on the same machine you would set linux to local time in order to have a useful clock in both operating systems. So, in your case: date --set whatever or better, with an internet connection ntpdate ntp.public.server and then hwclock --systohc --utc However the fact that sometimes, at boot, your clock is way off, might be because of BIOS, motherboard, bad power, whathaveyou, but not Linux. Linux keeps two clocks system clock and hardware clock (in BIOS). At boot, the system clock is set according to the hardware clock. If the later if wrong for some reason, well...