Re: Is the system clock broken ?
jens <jens@pacificsun.ca> wrote:
> Thanks for your reply Chris. Ok, I confess, I stuck an extra 'n' in there
> .... me bad.
Why, oh why, oh why, did you email me as well as replying here? If
someone answers your post then surely it's obvious they're reading the
newsgroup/mailing list, so you don't need to email them directly as
well. Please stop that nasty practice!
For the benefit of future googlers (or whatever), here's a summary of
the ensuing email discussion:
> The above commands all show correctly. I guess what I am trying to say is
> that if I just enter 'date' I get UTC time which is correct since my
> system 'thinks' it's on UTC even though I entered time in PST. Now if I go
> to configure date & time under KDE, the current time zone indicates UTC
> which is what the computer thinks it is. I can change it to
> America/Vancouver and apply that change and the current time zone shows
> PST - everything is still peachy. When I exit the date & time adjustment
> window and then re-enter it, we are magically back to UTC (rather than PST).
> In previous versions of Debian, this was remembered correctly.
[ I suggested that this might be a bug, which jens later confirmed. ]
> On a different note, I have always entered local time into the hardware
> clock and things have always run well. I also use local time on a server
> box I have running. Why would i want to have the BIOS show UTC ? It would
> seem to me that it really makes no difference as long as the computer
> knows what time zone is being used. Am I missing something here ?
Yes. Unless you configure you BIOS clock to run as UTC, the daylight
savings time switch won't happen automatically. This is because Debian
assumes "another OS" (usually a Windows variant) will change the BIOS
clock.
If you're not dual-booting, I strongly recommend you to run the BIOS clock
as UTC and use the timezone configuration utility to tell your system it's
really running on America/Vancouver time (i.e. PST/PDT). Debian will then
automatically adjust for daylight savings time at the appropriate time on
the appropriate dates.
[ jens later concurred with the reasoning ]
Chris
Reply to: