Newbie Help With Date & Time
 

I have read chapter 16 on Time in the Debian sysadmin manual but I am still confused.

When I run the date command I have the correct UTC time returned. However, I am in EST timezone and in my /etc/timezone file it says America/New York which is also correct.

I am running kde for my desktop and the clock shows the UTC time, not EST. When I try and change the timezone through the Control Center to EST it will not change the clock.

Basically, my pc is stuck on UTC time and I can't figure out how to change it. I know I can reset the time using the date command but as soon as I reboot I will lose the setting. What I want to do is have the hardware clock set to UTC (which I think it is) and have the desktop set to localtime (EST). I know this must be a simple solution but I can't figure out what file/s to change.

Can anyone help?

Cheers,
Jude.

'date' should return your local time, not UTC, when things are configured correctly.

(To have time changes persist after a reboot, use hwclock --systohc to reset your hardware clock to the system clock.)

Try editing /etc/default/rcS and changing
UTC=no
to
UTC=yes

if it's there.

Hi,

Thanks for your reply but I'm still confused here.

Am I correct in assuming that the hwclock should be set to UTC and the system clock should be set to EST?

If so, my hwclock is correct, I just need to change the system time. I ran hwclock --hctosys but nothing happened, or if it did, I don't know what. If you could let me know how it should be configured that would help a lot. I've read the hwclock man page as well but that also doesn't tell you how things *should* be configured.

Thanks,
Jude