When I turned on my PC at home in Sun Jan 2 2000, first I typed date and ... (surprise!!), my PC was living in 1994. This problem is related to the old mainboard used by this computer, but it is not necessary to buy a new one (as other OS users do ;-)
This small page explains what I had to do to set the 2000year date when turning on my bought-in-1994 old Pentium 75MHz running under RedHat 5.2.

• Change directory to /etc/rc.d:

  cd /etc/rc.d
  

• (as root) Create a new file named rc.y2k (for example) with the following lines:

  #!/bin/sh
  
  # This script will set the right date by adding 6 years to the
  # internal machine-time.
  date -s "`date --d '+6 years'`"
  

  And give it execute permission:

  chmod +x rc.y2k
  

  The rc.y2k file set the right date by adding 6 years (this is the case in my PC), but you change this number to your particular case.

• According to the runlevels used by RedHat:
  0 - halt (Do NOT set initdefault to this)
  1 - Single user mode
  2 - Multiuser, without NFS (The same as 3, if you do not have networking)
  3 - Full multiuser mode
  4 - unused
  5 - X11
  6 - reboot (Do NOT set initdefault to this)
  (usually, 3 is default)

  you make symbolic links from the corresponding directories to the rc.y2k file

  cd /etc/rc.d/rc1.d
  ln -s ../rc.y2k S02y2k
  cd /etc/rc.d/rc2.d
  ln -s ../rc.y2k S02y2k
  cd /etc/rc.d/rc3.d
  ln -s ../rc.y2k S02y2k
  cd /etc/rc.d/rc5.d
  ln -s ../rc.y2k S02y2k