help!

I'm a total newb to Linux, I got everything installed correctly. Using mandrake 9.0 right now. The question I have about is my time is always messed up. How do I have linux grab the time from the bios? I'm not sure WHAT I've done wrong with that part on the installation, it mentioned something about time but I didn't know what to select. It's very annoying but I can mannage. It would be nice to figure out though.

:) Thx a bunch.

Linux does, of course, grab the time from your mobo's RTC. Are the minutes and seconds somewhat correct? In that case you've probably just configured to wrong timezone.

you could add ntpdate along with your favorite ntp server in your bootup-scripts...

When I boot into linux the time is alawys wrong. It's off by hours. Right now it's 9 but the clock says 4. I thought there were two clocks, hardware and software.

There are two clocks, like you said. The hardware clock (or RTC, real time clock), which runs in its own battery-backup chip on the mobo, and the software clock, which the kernel maintains itself using the processor's time-keeping, which is much more accurate. Since that's erased when you turn the power off, the kernel initializes its software clock from the RTC data when it boots, though.
But like I said, if it's off by an even number of hours, you probably just configured your timezone wrong.

I have the timezone correct, America Chicago I'm in wisconsin.

Including DST, wouldn't that be -0500 GMT? That would correlate pretty good to what you said about it being 9 but the clock saying 4. Maybe you've just configured that part wrong.
Do you have your clock automatically synchronizing with a time server?