clock troubles under Debian/PowerPC

[Renaud Dreyer <rdreyer@math.berkeley.edu>]

   I think I tracked down the reason why I keep getting the message:

/etc/modules.conf is more recent than /lib/modules/2.2.14/modules.dep
modprobe: insmod * failed

when booting. Before rebooting, I ran depmod -a to make sure that
/lib/modules/2.2.14/modules.dep was more recent than
/etc/modules.conf.  However, when booting starts, apparently the
system thinks it's december 31st, 1969 (is that normal or is it some
Y2K bug?). It runs depmod -a at this point, which regenerates
/lib/modules/2.2.14/modules.dep...  but to the date of December 31st,
1969! So then, obviously, /etc/modules.conf becomes "more recent" than
/lib/modules/2.2.14/modules.dep, and I get the error message.

Any ideas how I could fix this? Why does the system think it's December
31st 1969 when booting? I boot from MacOS using BootX. Thanks,

            Renaud