Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Casey Harkins <charkins AT upl.cs.wisc.edu>]

Are you dual-booting with Windows? The ideal situation (in my opinion) is 
to keep your system clock in UTC time. Linux will then convert between UTC 
and your timezone automatically. This should handle daylight savings 
gracefully.

Windows on the otherhand, insists on storing the system time in the local 
time format. Linux will happily let you do this, but then the time needs 
to be adjusted at daylight savings time. Windows will do this for you 
automatically, and there may be Linux applications out there to do this 
automatically as well. However, if you are dual-booting, there is no way 
for either OS to know if the other has already adjusted, so you'd better 
only have one or the other set up to automatically adjust.

Personally, I rarely boot into windows and don't really care if the time 
is off. So I keep my system time stored in UTC, and have Windows set up to 
*not* adjust for daylight savings automatically. The time on the Linux 
side is always correct, while the time on the Windows side is always 
showing the UTC time.

The /etc/sysconfig/hwclock file sets up how Linux should use the system 
clock (UTC=yes or UTC=no). The file /etc/localtime should be a symlink to 
the correct timezone file. 

casey@brak:~$ cat /etc/sysconfig/hwclock 
# does the hardware clock store the time in UTC
UTC=yes

casey@brak:~$ ls -l /etc/localtime 
lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root 30 Oct 30 16:10 /etc/localtime -> 
/usr/share/zoneinfo/US/Central


Hope this helps.

-casey


On Mon, 12 Apr 2004, Jeremy Kolb wrote:

> eastern
> 
> On Mon, 2004-04-12 at 11:21, Robert Helgesson wrote:
> > On Mon, Apr 12, 2004 at 10:36:52 -0500, Jeremy Kolb wrote:
> > > My computer never adjusted for daylight savings.  How do I set it up
> > > to do this, it's done it in the past.  Also now whenever I use rdate
> > > it shows "pre-savings" times on the servers.  Is why is this? Curious.
> > 
> > Which timezone are you in?
>