Hi there --

I am trying to adjust the system time on a Red Hat Fedora Core 2 system to reflect the timezone that it is in rather than UTC. The timezone in question is America/NewYork.

I have gone through the motions of adjusting the time via the GUI interface as well as through the setup menu and also making sure that the UTC option in both instances is NOT checked. The system runs ntp and I have confirmed that the /etc/ntp.conf as well as the /etc/ntp/ntpservers and /etc/ntp/step-tickers files have the appropriate server information in them. When I run the ntpq -p command, the output shows the system being in synch with the timeservers.

The problem is the following: Whenever I run the date command, the output reads a time that is inconsistent with the localtime, and it also has UTC as part of its output. The clock on the desktop menubar also shows the incorrect time.

I ran the hwclock command without any success, and even after I rebooted the system, went into the BIOS and modified the system clock to reflect the correct time, the problem was not resolved.

Has anyone seen this, and can tell me what else I need to do? Thanks.

The system clock can be adjusted using the hwclock command or through the BIOS. The clock on your computer is usually set to localtime or UTC. What you are seeing when running the date command is determined by the file /etc/localtime. Users can see their local time by setting the TZ environment variable. If this variable is not present it will use /etc/localtime to determine the default setting.

There are zoneinfo files located in the /usr/share/zoneinfo directory. These files allow a user in Moscow to see their local time even if they are logged in on a server in Washington, DC. They also automatically make adjustments for standard time or daylight savings time.

If you want the default on your system to be the local time in New York you can do one of two things. Copy the file /usr/share/zoneinfo/EST5EDT to /etc/localtime or make /etc/localtime a symbolic link pointing to /usr/share/zoneinfo/EST5EDT. I prefer the later because if your tzdata package gets updated you won't have to bother with any update to /etc/localtime.

Bill