i have spoken by email to the developer of hwclock. he said he will change Hwclock in the next release to recognize a negative result from mktime() as invalid, so it will recognize a pre-1970 value of the hardware clock as an error.
a quicker solution would be putting something in /etc/init.d/hwclock.sh to detect pre 1970 dates. -- Gnome wont start if date is incorrect. https://launchpad.net/bugs/23426 -- desktop-bugs mailing list desktop-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/desktop-bugs
