Problem with the System Time and BIOS Clock
Problem:
The BIOS clock and the system time drift significantly apart. The BIOS time and the system time under KANOTIX do not run synchronously. You can check this with a "one liner" in a terminal, as root
# hwclock; date;sleep 60;hwclock;date
Output:
[1] We 17 Nov 2004 17:45:51 CET -0.784780 Seconds
[2] We Nov 17 17:29:06 CET 2004
[3] We 17 Nov 2004 17:48:43 CET -0.535798 Seconds
[4] We Nov 17 17:30:06 CET 2004
One sees here that the system time (output of date line 2 and 4) clearly differs from the real time (BIOS clock = hwclock, line 1 and 3). 60 seconds in real time were 2 minutes 52 seconds for the system.
Solution:
The fault lies mostly in the power management (APM and/or ACPI) of the motherboard. Since ACPI is the more current of the two, it probably very well becomes one of the most frequent problems with older boards which only know the older variant, APM. Proceed as follows:
When starting the PC, go into the BIOS and switch off power management, (most of the time, it can be switched off completely with an option). Now bring up Kanotix, log in as root, and edit the GRUB config file with your favourite editor. But before editing, do make a backup copy, just in case.
su -
cd /boot/grub
cp -p menu.lst menu.lst.orig
vi menu.lst
.... go to the end of the file and make a new menu entry for the boot manager, something like:
title My special boot options
root (hd0,4)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda5 ro ramdisk_size=100000 lang=de apm=off \
acpi=off nomce vga=0x317
boot
Naturally, you must adapt it to your boot partition (root and kernel line) and your special boot paramaters. At best, orient yourself by a functioning menu entry. The power management is set by the options
apm=off and
acpi=off, which switch off both features. Save the modified
menu.lst and boot the system again.
When the GRUB Menu appears, select the new created entry "
My special boot options". If Kanotix is "UP" test the times again with the "one liner" command. As a result, the system time should not appear to deviate from the BIOS time
(60 sec. system time = 60 sec. BIOS time).
That's it.