Ron, I was just brushing up on the subject against the mini-howto, http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/docs/HOWTO/mini/other-formats/html_single/C lock.html Or for all http://www.linuxdoc.org/, and the jist of it was, at startup, linux copies the time in the hardware clock to the system clock in memory, which runs off a timed software routine to keep the clock on time. It never references the hwclock again, unless a startup occurs, or manual intervention takes place. Adjtime allows you to give the software clock a tweak factor if for some reason the software drumbeat is not timed right, interjecting a correction factor. Hope that helps, Dave Gomez On 2/14/02 7:38 PM, "Ron McCall" <ronald.mccall@snet.net> wrote:
I am running SuSE 7.3 on a new G4/800 (single processor) and have noticed that the clock is losing about 3 minutes every 24 hours or so. I have never had any problems like this on any other system.
I booted up OS X last night planning to let it run overnight to see if it was losing time as well (I normally run Linux 24 hours a day). Upon booting OS X, the time was immediately corrected! I don't think I have NTP enabled (still running the factory install of OS X) but I should double check to be sure. Assuming that I don't have NTP enabled, doesn't that mean that the hardware clock is keeping correct time and thus it is the Linux system time that is drifting?
I've been researching the issue a bit and have run across the /etc/adjtime file. Mine just has one line of zeroes (0.0 0 0.0) so there is nothing strange going on there (unless it is supposed to be non-zero, of course). I noticed that the TZ environment variable is not set for my normal user account nor the root account but I did set the timezone during installation and it is set properly in the Control Center.
Does anyone have any suggestions on how to fix this? Do I really need to run ntpd? I've never had to before. Do I just need to do some adjustments with hwclock?
Thanks, Ron