[TriLUG] Correction: The /hardware/ clock isn't UTC

[Brian Henning]

Replying to myself to correct the subject..  I do actually know the 
difference between system and hardware clocks..
~B

Brian Henning wrote:
> 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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