This setclock script reads the time from your hardware clock (also known as BIOS or CMOS clock) and either converts that time to localtime using the /etc/localtime file (if the hardware clock is set to GMT) or not (if the hardware clock is already set to localtime). There is no way to auto-detect whether the hardware clock is set to GMT or not, so we need to configure that here ourselves. Change the value of the UTC variable below to a 0 (zero) if your hardware clock is not set to GMT time. Create a new file /etc/sysconfig/clock by running the following: cat > /etc/sysconfig/clock << "EOF" # Begin /etc/sysconfig/clock UTC=1 # End /etc/sysconfig/clock EOF Now, you may want to take a look at a very good hint explaining how we deal with time on LFS at . It explains issues such as time zones, UTC, and the TZ environment variable.