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

[OlsonE at aosa.army.mil]

Not sure how Debian is setup, but in Gentoo:

rm /etc/localtime
create a symlink from /etc/localtime -> /path/of/your/timezone

i also have the ntp service running @ boot to sync up my clock. 

-----Original Message-----
From: trilug-bounces at trilug.org [mailto:trilug-bounces at trilug.org] On
Behalf Of Brian Henning
Sent: Thursday, October 05, 2006 11:01 AM
To: TriLUG
Subject: [TriLUG] Can't convince Debian the system clock isn't UTC

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


--
----------------
Brian A. Henning
strutmasters.com
336.597.2397x238
----------------
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