Re: [Sheflug] Re: Kmail / clock settings [was: Kmail]

["Chris J" <cej [at] xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

And Lo! The Great Prophet " Richard Ibbotson" uttered these words of wisdom...
>
> We had a discussion about this on the SuSE English list for two days  over
> the weekend.  Someone was going on about the fact that part of  the
> /etc/sysconfig/clock file was missing.  Mine now reads as ...  SuSE 8.1
> ....
>

[snip lots]

It's worth knowing what this does on the system I think; essentially all
that is needed to select a timezone is to symlink one of the files in the
system timezone directory (on my Slack box it is /usr/share/zoneinfo) to a
file localtime. So /usr/share/zoneinfo/localtime points to
/usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/London on my box. Often as well, you may see a
duplicate link in /etc that older, legacy programs may use. On other UNIXes,
the localtime file can often be called timezone instead.

There is also an environment variable TZ that you can set (TZ=GMT or
whatever) to override the system setting.

As for how you set the system (BIOS) clock is personal preference. I tend to
prefer running UTC on linux only systems, but UTC/BST on dual boot systems
(mostly due to the annoying windows thing of forcing the BIOS clock to
change as it doesn't handle timezones nicely[1]). But providing you call
hwclock consistantly, it doesn't matter. If you sync your time from the
internet (using ntpdate, netdate, or xntpd), the BIOS clock can be an
irrelevance.

> and then open up the KDE control centre and set the local time as
> Europe/London and the time on your watch/clock next to you.  This  isn't
> trivial and I wouldn't expect someone to know about this.  I  got it from
> more than one developer.

Hm. I'd have thought KDE should have been able to talk to the underlying
system to find out what timezone its in. If you're having to set it here as
well as on the filesystem/environment then that's a drawback of KDE rather
than anything else.

Most dists I thought asked you which timezone you were in when you installed
anyway, so fiddling with timezone config in startup files or on the
filesystem shouldn't be required? Correct me if I'm wrong though :)

In short, if the localtime symlink exists, your system should understand
timezones[2]. Any program that doesn't then act right just isn't using the
information that's already there :)

Chris...

[1] this was even more true with win95 -- I remember watching the clock
change at 2am one Winter, then an hour later, after it had changed the
clock, it wanted to knock it back an hour later as it was 2am again.

[2] I say should as someone's bound to give an example where it doesn't work
so this gets me out of that hole ;)

-- 
\ Chris Johnson                 \
 \ cej [at] nightwolf.org.uk          \
  \ http://cej.nightwolf.org.uk/  ~-----------------------------------+
   \ Redclaw chat - http://redclaw.org.uk - telnet redclaw.org.uk 2000 \____



___________________________________________________________________

Sheffield Linux User's Group -
http://www.sheflug.co.uk/mailfaq.html

  GNU the choice of a complete generation.