Package: clock-setup From a thread in -boot: > On Thursday 13 August 2009, Uwe Bugla wrote: > > a. as default installation I always use expert install > > b. the NTP question I always answer with "Yes". The installer tells me > > that my local time zone is "Europe / Berlin" > > c. The UTC question I always answer with no, without having some crap > > like Windoze installed on my HD. The question of what makes sense and > > what does not I do leave open..... > > Using local time for your hardware clock when you're only running Linux > really makes no sense at all. > > The most obvious example is a notebook that you travel around with. If the > hardware clock is set to UTC you can take the notebook anywhere around > the world and always have the correct local time simply by changing the > time zone. > > But even for systems that don't travel local time does not make any sense. > Why would you want to change the hardware clock when summer time > starts/ends? It does not improve the way the system is used in any way. > > > d. After the installation is finished the clock setting of my BIOS was > > trimmed by 2 hours which I wanted to avoid. > > I agree that what you describe looks like a bug. > > I suspect that the cause is the following: > - the installer itself has no knowledge of timezones, it just runs in > "current" time, taken either from the hardware clock or rdate > - rdate always updates the system time to UTC > - we update the hardware clock from the /target chroot *after* configuring > the chroot to reflect that the hardware clock is supposed to be in local > time, but the time that gets written is the system's current time, which > is UTC. > > So basically finish-install.d/10clock-setup is wrong and should run > hwclock --systohc --utc _before_ changing the local/utc setting in > /etc/adjtime. > But that should be done *only* if rdate was run successfully. In fact, I > don't think there is any reason to write the hardware clock at all if the > system time was not updated by rdate. > > Uwe: please file a bug report against clock-setup with the details of the > problem, including the description of the choices you make during > installation and my analysis. Well, I think that all needed info is in the above quote, so I take responsibility for opening that bug (will reassign it to Uwe as submitter). Uwe, no need for you to do it. I agree with Frans (who, btw, corrected me on one point: when Windows is detected on the system, defaults installs do *not* prompt about the HW clock being UTC or not....as Windows nearly enforces having the HW clock set to local time). We apparently have a bug here, that was not discovered because very few people have the local time for the HW clock.
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