Time vs. X11

[Ron Smith]

Does anyone know why X would not start if the system time is wrong 
(i.e. Jan 6, 1904)?

I have an early Ti Pb with the standard loose battery problem. The 
battery jiggled loose and dumped the system. When I rebooted yaboot and 
YDL worked just fine (I boot into text mode) until I tried startx. X 
(or gnome?)  attempted to start, exited on "error type 3" so I killed 
the X server (option-command-delete) to get back to a terminal.

After a few more attempts to start it met with the same results I was 
mindlessly playing with command line utilities and happened upon date 
which led me here. rdate did not work with time.apple.com (using TCP or 
UDP) so I reset the system time by booting into OS X and using that 
time sync utility (time.apple.com played well with it). I booted back 
into YDL and startx worked.

-Ron