Most modern Linux distributions have user-friendly programs to set
the timezone, often accessible through the program menus or
right-clicking the clock in a desktop environment such as KDE or GNOME.
Failing that it's possible to manually change the system timezone in
Linux in a few short steps.
Steps
- For ubuntu: [1]http://webonrails.com/2009/07/15/change-timezone-of-ubuntu-machine-from-command-line/
- Logged in as root, check which timezone your machine is currently using by executing `date`. You'll see something like
Mon 17 Jan 2005 12:15:08 PM PST
, PST in this case is the current timezone.
- Change to the directory
/usr/share/zoneinfo
here you will find a list of time zone regions. Choose the most appropriate region, if you live in Canada or the US this directory is the "America" directory.
- If you wish, backup the previous timezone configuration by copying it to a different location. Such as
mv /etc/localtime /etc/localtime-old
- Create a symbolic link to the appropriate timezone from /etc/localtime. Example:
ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/Amsterdam /etc/localtime
- If you have the utility rdate, update the current system time by executing
/usr/bin/rdate -s time-a.nist.gov
- Set the ZONE entry in the file
/etc/sysconfig/clock
file (e.g. "America/Los_Angeles")
- Set the hardware clock by executing:
/sbin/hwclock --systohc

Tips
- The time server parameter for rdate can be any public server that supports the RFC-868 time protocol. A list of public RFC-868 servers can be found at [2]. Note: As of April 2007, NIST announced it would phase out support for RFC-868 (scroll to the bottom of [3] to see the announcement). This has not happened as of April 2009).
- On some versions of RedHat Linux, Slackware, Gentoo, SuSE, Debian, Ubuntu, and anything else that is "normal", the command to display and change the time is 'date', not 'clock'
- On RedHat Linux there is a utility called "Setup" that allows one to select the timezone from a list, but you must have installed the 'redhat-config-date' package. < note... on RHEL5 it is actually 'system-config-date' >
- On mobile phones and other small devices that run Linux, the time zone is stored differently. It is written in /etc/TZ, in the format that is described, for instance, in [4]. Edit this file manually or use echo (for instance, echo GMT0BST > /etc/TZ to set the the timezone of the United Kingdom).
- To setup UTC :
- vi /etc/sysconfig/clock and change the UTC line to: "UTC=true"
- On systems that use dpkg (for example Debian and Ubuntu/Kubuntu), you should try "sudo dpkg-reconfigure tzdata". This will set up everything correctly in very few, simple steps.
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