Hello,

I'm a little confused on what to set my time to on my Linux machine(running Gentoo).

If I set the motherboard time to the current time(Japan) and then set the Gentoo clock timezone to Japan I get the wrong time on my system.

I then proceed to set the timezone to UTC on Gentoo.

So my question is: Should I be setting my motherboard time to a standard time and then setting Gentoo to Japan? If not, why would you need to use the Japan time zone at all as a setting? Wouldnt you just use UTC all the time?

your system clock should really always be UTC, as a global, universal even, standard. Software level "overlays" of this should then personalise it at the last minute to make it locally suitable to you.

Whilst it can be said to be 8am in London / UTC and it's what... 3pm or something in Japan it's still "NOW!" everywhere, and ultimately a timezone and HH:MM:SS notations are just prettying up conventions, your system clock should still be keeping track of the time in the whole universe. (well, save for singularities and that freaky stuff)

1 members found this post helpful.

Thank you for the great response. I'm going to change all of my pc clocks to UTC time.

Thanks again