[SOLVED]system clock

[heinkel_111]

I bought my laptop in the US, but now live in the CET (central european time zone). I have used the GUI tools to set my timezone right and the clock on my desktop has been showing the right time, but always the system clock (file timestamps etc) has been running in central US time (7 hours behind CET) and now after KDE 4.2 update i noticed the desktop clock also jumped back to central US time zone.

How do I set the system clock to correspond to my current time zone? I have tried to use the date command but it does not seem to have a lasting effect. (? - user error possible....)

[Monotoko]

Re: system clock

Change the time in your BIOS, that should fix it

[kevinc]

Re: system clock

You can change the system time from
Kmenu > System > System settings > Date & Time

Change the region, click apply and that should do it. It gives you the option of using a public time server too.

Right mouse clicking on the task bar clock gives clock settings - the options of displaying a different region. This is good when you are traveling and want local time displayed.

[heinkel_111]

Re: system clock

I am thankful for your support but I am not sure this is that easy.

FIRST: I checked the clock in BIOS and it was actually wrong by 1hr, running on daylight savings time for the CET time zone. My Kubuntu clock on the other hand is 7 hours off, leaving a difference of 6 hours yet to be explained.

SECOND: I tried to set the clock in the Kubuntu system settings panel. Not possible - all I get, regardless of whether I do this manually (setting the clock) or ticking of for set time automatically and selecting timezone, I get a complaint that the computer is unable to connect to an ntp server.

[tomp01]

Re: system clock

I am thankful for your support but I am not sure this is that easy.

FIRST: I checked the clock in BIOS and it was actually wrong by 1hr, running on daylight savings time for the CET time zone. My Kubuntu clock on the other hand is 7 hours off, leaving a difference of 6 hours yet to be explained.

SECOND: I tried to set the clock in the Kubuntu system settings panel. Not possible - all I get, regardless of whether I do this manually (setting the clock) or ticking of for set time automatically and selecting timezone, I get a complaint that the computer is unable to connect to an ntp server.

Try setting the time server with sudo ntpdate europe.pool.ntp.org

[flarson]

Re: system clock

Try
sudo dpkg-reconfigure tzdata

[soonchica]

Re: system clock

sudo ntpdate europe.pool.ntp.org

did it for me.

[heinkel_111]

Re: system clock

sudo dpkg-reconfigure tzdata shows some promise

myuser@mylaptop:~$ sudo dpkg-reconfigure tzdata

(a simple gui is initiated in which I select my location)
This gives the following result:

Current default timezone: 'Europe/Oslo'
Local time is now:   Tue Mar 10 18:57:37 CET 2009.
Universal Time is now: Tue Mar 10 17:57:37 UTC 2009.

The date command confirms that something changed for the better

myuser@mylaptop:~$ date
Tue Mar 10 19:01:55 CET 2009

The KDE clock in lower right hand corner of my desktop, on the other hand, is still 7 hours behind the times

[heinkel_111]

Re: system clock

I also did the sudo ntpdate europe thing, which again did not change my kde clock.

However, the KDE clock was set to defult to local time *this is a gui switch in digital clock settings which is accessed by right clicking on the digital clock. I would really believe that local time should be the one that corresponds to the timezone here which I now have set to Europe, Oslo - but no: local still seems to be Central US time zone Anyway, I could flick this switch to correspond to the chosen time zone too, so now it looks correct.

More important, the system clock now shows correct time when I create a new file. This was an issue with respect to synchronizing files with a folder on another computer. When they did not agree on what time it was they also did not agree on which file was the most recent version.

I guess this is sort of [SOLVED] but still a little puzzling with respect to why local time is still in central US time zone...