Very simple question but very frustrating as none of the other threads/bug reports/whatever have had quite the same problem. I want gnome clock to display the time in 12 hour format. The suggested solution is something like right-click the clock -> Preferences and somewhere there will be an option to choose 12/24 hour time. Problem is I don't have that option.

The help has a note that 12 hour time "is not shown if your session language does not use the 12 hour clock" but this really shouldn't be a problem? My language/locale/city, everything I can think of, it's all some variation of en_GB, UK English, Brisbane, Australia: all places which should allow the option of 12 hour clock! So why don't I have that option?

I'm so frustrated about this, so my heartfelt thanks go to anyone who can help.

Try the Applications menu for System tools - Configuration editor. If you don't have it, install gconf-editor. There you can click successively on apps - panel - applets - clock - prefs and change the entry for "format" to "12-hour". NB here and in the examples below, you may find "clock" is called "clock_screen0".

Alternatively, edit ~/.gconf/apps/panel/applets/clock/prefs/%gconf.xml and ensure it contains
<entry name="format" mtime="1283439736" schema="/schemas/apps/clock_applet/prefs/format" type="string">
<stringvalue>12-hour</stringvalue>
</entry>
(the number may be different in your file)

Thirdly, you could use the command
gconftool-2 -t string -s /apps/panel/clock/prefs "12-hour"


PS It's a good idea to show your distro in your profile: gnome is not exactly the same in all of them.

Thanks for all those suggestions. I went through all of them but they all already do say 12-hour time in the relevant entries. I still don't see an option in the GUI gnome clock preferences to change to 12-hour time, which is sort of making me think the clock or the panel or something has a different idea of what my locale is and so it's defaulting to what it thinks my region uses? But that's just a wild guess in the dark and I can't see anything in gnome configuration editor that seems even vaguely relevant to that.

PS Thanks for the tip about the distro thing, as you can now see it's opensuse 11.3 sorry for not stating that in advance.

If ~/.gconf/apps/panel/applets/clock/prefs/%gconf.xml says you've got a 12 hour clock and you haven't, that's a bug: report it to Suse.

I should have suggested another possible solution: use the configuration editor, set the format to "custom", and then you can enter a custom format six lines above; I have
%R %a %d/%m

Find the parameters with "man date"; you'll probably want to include %r.