On 4/18/05, Neal Wilkinson <forums.lists@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Mon, 2005-04-18 at 13:55 -0400, David Cary Hart wrote: > Just right clicking and choosing "adjust date and time." Has always > worked in the past. I set it to set itself and the stupid thing is > reading UCT and so all my time stamps are screwed up. I can "display" > another time zone (even mine) but it still stamps everything UCT. First, internally almost all timestamps are stored in UTC anyway. This includes file dates, kernel clock, and so forth. It is just the user interface software which translates the UTC times into your local time. So I doubt that your timestamps are really goofed up. Now which timezone you see is controled by the /etc/sysconfig/clock configuration file. This is what the system-config-date GUI tool modifies for you, but you can just as easily edit it by hand. For example in a typical Eastern Time in the USA, the file might look like, ZONE="America/New_York" UTC=true ARC=false The ZONE variable describes which timezone you're in. Actually this is just a config setting....see below for how the real timezone is determined. The UTC describes whether your hardware clock (the one on the motherboard with the battery) keeps UTC or local time. If you're dual booting with Windows you'll want it false since Windows always assumes local time (hence the daylight savings dialog box that always pops up twice a year). However, if you aren't sharing with Windows you should probably keep the hardware clock in UTC all the time. (This shows up as the "System clock uses UTC" checkbox in the dialog). The ARC setting (and optionally a SRM setting) are only used on old DEC Alpha platforms. See the man page for hwclock(8) for additional information. Now, the real timezone used to display times is determined for each process by this set of steps... 1. If the $TZ environment variable is set, use that. 2. If the /etc/localtime file exists, use that (this is a binary file) 3. Otherwise use UTC. This also means that if you have a multi-user system, each use could have their own timezone independent of each other. (The timezone is an application concept, not a kernel property). Typically under Fedora, it is #2 above which gets used. The /etc/localtime file is a copy of the corresponding timezone information file under the /usr/share/zoneinfo directory. For example, to force your timezone to Eastern USA, your could do cp /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/New_York /etc/localtime -- Deron Meranda
