Hi,

Two different Hard drives. Slack 12 on one and Debian 4.0 is on the other, the 2nd, HD.

Time works fine in Slack but not Debian where it is off by hours, near four or five hours or so off.

Both O.S. are set to "pacific" Los Angeles, United States time zone and both are set to localtime.

I can shut down from Debian then boot into Slack and the time then is fine.

It can't be a bios problem. It must be some difference between how the 2 O.S. handle time (or there's a setting I didn't yet know I needed to check).

Does anyone know where to start, what to check for on this one?

--
Alan.

I've had similar problem. BIOS time was local, but OS took it as UTC and because I selected to display localtime, it added +2 hours. If I remember correctly, there was some setting in Gnome date manager to use UTC or not. Might be smth similar in KDE too.

Further checks, info.:

Bios clock is set to local time at time zone America, Los_Angeles

Slack 12 displays the correct time so it's reflecting this about what the bios clock is set to.

Debian 4 displays exactly 7 hours off, 7 hours earlier in the day.

All of this tells me that Debian is (incorrectly) thinking that my bios clock is set to UTC since to convert from UTC time would provide (the 7 hour difference)

Both O.S. set to use localtime.

Likely is in gdm.conf or some obscure place on Debian (so far unable to find what/where)

A time howto said about link /usr/share/zoneinfo/america/Los_Angeles link that to /etc/localtime

But neither of these 2 O.S. have or use such link. And, Slack displays the correct time.

??

Look how many different ways there are to get X started in Linux.

Likely this (multiple ways) also goes on with how time gets managed too.

--
Alan.

Try in Debian the command "hwclock --hctosys"

Brian

Thanks. Very close. But, it also needed the --localtime option so as to get Debian habituated to that my bios clock is set to localtime not set to utc time.

Somehow, only in Debian, (wasn't supposed to) but nonetheless did, was set as if the hwclock (bios clock) is using UTC

But my bios clock is not set to UTC; I have it set to local time.

hwclock is the relevant command.

man hwclock

AB60R:~# hwclock --localtime --hctosys

That fixed it. It now thinks my bios clock uses local time. Gnome now displays the correct time (KDE in Debian too).

The above listed man page reports that it will keep using what it formerly had been set at (either UTC or local time) unless you call it with either the utc or the localtime option.

The above listed command calls it with the local time option which sets it to use local time (habituates Linux that my bios clock is set to local time). Works upon reboot too (I checked it).

Problem resolved, fixed. Thanks.

--
Alan.

This also "should" work:

Using Super User File Manager <--kde
/etc/default/rcS
UTC=no