[TriLUG] Can't convince Debian the system clock isn't UTC

[Brian Henning]

Hi Gang,
   Seems like I had this problem before on a different machine, but the 
posts I found about it (march of 05) aren't helping this time.  Here's 
the skinny:

Brand new shiny Lenovo T60p, dual-booting XP Pro and Debian Etch.  Works 
beautifully (for the bits I've figured out so far; ati setup was a 
hassle but I conquered it, and the 3D acceleration makes my head spin!) 
except...the clock.

I'm using KDE for my desktop environment.  The KDE clock applet is set 
to Eastern/New_York, and consistently shows a time four hours slow (XP 
shows correct time).  This seems to indicate that Debian thinks the 
hardware clock is UTC when it is actually local time.  The thing is, 
none of the settings seem to make any difference.  In /etc/defaults/rcS, 
I have "UTC=no" (without quotes of course) and /etc/adjtime contains 
"LOCAL".  Command-line tools such as uptime and top also show the 
four-hour-slow time.

Further confusing me, I tried changing rcS to contain UTC=yes and 
adjtime to contain UTC, and it made no difference!  The clock still 
reads four hours slow.

The proof is in the pudding (or the date command, here):

% date
Thu Oct  5 07:00:31 EDT 2006
% date --utc
Thu Oct  5 11:00:33 EDT 2006

Clearly the UTC time is actually local time.

So.. um..  What do I do to fix it?  I've tried Googling for how to 
control whether the hardware clock is local or UTC, and nothing I've 
come up with seems to be useful.

Thanks a lot,
~Brian


-- 
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Brian A. Henning
strutmasters.com
336.597.2397x238
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