I've just installed an antiX system with rox-icewm as the window manager. I want to change the format of the displayed date/time on the taskbar. According to the manual I need to edit the ~/.icewm/preferences file. So I did that and saved it, remembering to remove the comment characters.

But the format remains stubbornly with a US-style date. This has survived several reboots.

Any ideas what I'm doing wrong (I'm a Linux noob) please?

Peter

My guess is that you need to change the timezone setting, not the clock setting. Though they are related, they are often separate settings.

Check whether your system has a handy little utility called tzselect and run it as root.

Thanks, I'll try that. Though I'd have thought that the time format in the window's taskbar would override anything in the bash login.

[later] It didn't change anything!

https://download.tuxfamily.org/antix...FAQ/icewm.html

As correctly written by frankbell

The date format follow the default locale.

You don't write what you changed in your ~/.icewm/preferences but the line to change in case is the last line of the clock section

DateFormat="%c"

%c stands for the default system timezone.

On antiX and every debian/devuan derivative you can set the default system timezone issuing as root the command

dpkg-reconfigure tzdata

Anyway take in mind that in old school (once upon a timen in GNU/Linux all was a plain text file and everyone was able to tweak the system now infected by systemd's binaries to need and pay Big Corps engineers) DE's like iceWM, JWM aso you have to restart the DE for changes to take effect if you change a config file.

Hope this helped.

Thanks all for the advice.

I've found the problem: TimeFormat was set twice in the preferences file. Once early on, and commented out. This was the one I uncommented and changed. But it's also in the same file on line 679(!) and not commented out, so my change wasn't noticed. Grrrrr!

Timezones appear to be irrelevant, though.