The clocks have gone back one hour in the UK and so the system time on the OS is an hour ahead.

I'm using the xfce desktop and it's not very slick at changing the time.

So what is the command to change the system time from the terminal? Thanks in advance.

You can manually set the date/time using the date command i.e.

date -s "7 APR 2017 18:00:00"

Normally, assuming your tz database and timezone is configured correctly the clock should automatically adjust for daylight saving time.

Gone back? Didn't time switch Sunday, March 26, 2017 which moved an hour forward. So your system time should be an hour behind.

Thank you for your reply.
I was looking for some kind of automatic time changing thing which takes account of British Summer Time (BST).

Yes, this is what I was expecting.
I am wondering if Debian-users have experienced this on their OS if their country has a similar 'daylight saving time' procedure?

Also, there must be a method of taking 'system time' from some reputable internet source (e.g. UK.gov).
Is there a command to take 'system time' from a specific UK website?

Yes, this is a little confusing, but my system time is actually 1 hour ahead.
Is there some way of finding out where the problem lies?
During install, I'm pretty certain I gave the right info to choose the correct timezone.

You should set up NTP, it will keep your time synchronized.

Yes, but isn't there a way of getting Debian to just tell the time without getting hacked?

Have you set up NTP on your system?

I run NTP server in my router, which gets the time from net and serves to all devices on LAN.

ntp will keep the the system clock synchronized but it has nothing to do with time zones or DST changing.

The system clock and ntp are referenced to UTC.

Just to be sure use dpkg-reconfigure tzdata to run its setup again making sure you have chosen the correct option. The time always has changed correctly here in the many years I have used Debian. Also you have made sure the BIOS time is set correctly?

The output will display the timezone setting showing when DST switch over occurs.

zdump -v /etc/localtime | grep 2017

Shows what timezone is selected.
cat /etc/timezone

I have already done this. I expected it to resolve the problem.
However, the system time is still +1 hour to BST in the UK.
Don't know why this is happening.

Never had a problem with the time before. So I'm guessing BIOS time is ok.

You can use hwclock to check and change BIOS time.

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Its possible that your system thinks the BIOS is UTC but really configured for local time. You may not of noticed since your only +1 offset from UTC.

The configuration file /etc/adjtime last line should be either local or UTC. With the hwclock command you can check the BIOS clock to see.

I have done this and the output is:
This seems to be telling me when daylight saving time (DST) begins and ends. This is also known as British Summer Time (BST).
BST is shown on the output.
This is a good command to know.

The output is:
So it looks like I've chosen the correct timezone.

I have run 'hwclock' on the terminal.
It shows that the system time is 1 hour too far.

I need the Debian OS to simply show the same time as the country I live in.

Does anyone know?

So use hwclock to set right time?

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