Time Problem

Angela Kahealani yellowdog-general@lists.terrasoftsolutions.com
Sat Dec 21 18:56:01 2002


On Saturday, 2002-12-21 03:47, Joe Villari wrote:
> >Peter Bagnall wrote:
> >>MacOS and Linux use different ways of storing the time in the real
> >>time clock. One (and I forget which way round this is) uses UCT and
> >>the other uses local time. There is a way to force linux to do the
> >>same thing that MacOS does.

What I've learned about time on an old-world power-mac, which
requires MacOS / BootX to boot:

I'm running YDL 2.3 with latest apt-get update upgrade dist-upgrade.
>From other messages I've seen, my solution may fail at transitions of
Daylight-Savings-Time, not a problem for me where we don't do that.

KDE does not update it's time display dynamically, appearantly it
determines time-zone corrections at launch, so don't validate TZ
updates with its' display of time without logging out and back in
to KDE.

1) Boot into Mac OS, set time zone in "Date & Time" control panel,
	and try to get a sync operation from a network time server...
	now your hardware clock is Macified, so that rebooting in MacOS
	won't clobber your Linux setup / time.

2) Boot into Linux and use your favorite GUI (e.g. KDE) to set-up 
	your timezone and configure your ntp server for automatic 
	network time updates, then log-out of your GUI and get a 
	console shell without GUI.

Now you system should be very well screwed up, 
as you may confirm from the shell by running:
date;date -u
which will now show that your system is running UTC as its'
local time zone, but the actual time is set to your localtime, not Zulu.
Now it's time to repair your zoneinfo which got clobbered by
KDE's GUI time configuration software (your milage may vary on
other GUIs). Don't EVER redo the KDE time control panels, as
they will clobber the repair you're about to do manually...

3) Time to examine localtime (/etc/localtime) which is a symbolic
	link from /etc/localtime to a timezoneinfo file, which has now
	been zeroed erroneously by the KDE time control panel. Which
	link that is, was just set by the KDE time panel, the error was that
	it clobbered the linked-to file. You need to repair that file.

4)	Troll through the zoneinfo files until you find another file that
	describes your timezone, and then copy the contents over the
	file that's linked to by your /etc/localtime.

5)	date;date -u should now show localtime and UTC correctly.

6)	enjoy until Daylie Shaving Time appears or disappears in your
	local zone, whereupon you may need to repeat the above procedure.

The zoneinfo files are probably located in:
/usr/share/zoneinfo
unless you reconfigured something.

-- 
Copyright 2002 Angela Kahealani. http://www.kahealani.com/ 
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