[wellylug] Time zone

[Daniel Pittman]

Porges at porg.es writes:

>> Become root, then run 'tzconfig' and answer the questions.
>>
>> After that you will need to reset your system time if you are storing
>> local time, rather than UTC, in the hardware clock.
>
> Along a similar theme, my laptop has a little display that shows the
> current hardware clock time. At the moment this is set to UTC, so all
> times are now 13 hours off (it wasn't so bad with 12 hours off, even
> though it is 24-hour time, but now it's getting annoying).

Man, that is so full of suck in so many ways...  Thanks, Windows, for
inflicting your crippled and inflexible management of the RTC on us.

> How easy is it to change an existing Linux installation (currently
> running Ubuntu Edgy) to make the hardware clock use local time instead
> of UTC?  Will it still be updated automatically when DST hits? Are
> there any other caveats I need to be aware of?

Surprisingly easy; edit /etc/default/rcS and change the value of 'UTC'
to no, rather than yes.  

The system should push the updated time out to the hardware next time
you shut down, or you can advance that by running 

    /etc/init.d/hwclock.sh stop


It should continue to work fine, including for DST, because enough
people dual-boot Windows (and, so, require a localtime RTC) that this
will have been beaten into working correctly.  

Regards,
        Daniel
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