Timezone update [tzdata 2013d] needed

[SteveRiley]

the KDE digital clock in the lower left corner of the KDE desktop has the feature to set its own time zone which then prescribes what the system believes to be local time.

It depends on which part of the clock you're adjusting.

The firmware clock on my machine is set to UTC. The operating system's timezone is PST, as confirmed by:

steve@t520:~$ [B]date[/B]
Sun Dec 29 12:14:15 PST 2013

If I right-click the clock, choose Adjust date and time, and change the time zone there, the system's time zone is also changed. To test, I changed from Los Angeles to New York, and confirmed the change:

steve@t520:~$ date
Sun Dec 29 15:14:36 EST 2013

Then I changed it back to Los Angeles to return the system to PST.

The digital clock has more, though. Right-click the clock and chose Digital Clock Settings and select the Time Zone tab. If no time zone is selected, the clock defaults to local time (and the dropdown menu is not selectable). You can choose an alternate time zone here. When I selected New York, and then changed the dropdown menu to America/New York, the clock displays the time in the chosen zone, while the system itself remains in local time:

steve@t520:~$ date
Sun Dec 29 12:24:34 PST 2013

Creating a new text file in Dolphin:


KDE has always behaved thusly.

[kufischer]

Linux, MacOS, Android, iOS, minicomputers, and mainframes all "think" in UTC and only display local time.

If this actually was true, I would not have started my posts. I only now had the time to look more closely into this issue and found that the KDE digital clock in the lower left corner of the KDE desktop has the feature to set its own time zone which then prescribes what the system believes to be local time. For what ever reason the time zone for local time is set to UTC as a standard (this was like this on all three installs of kubuntu which I am using, two were set up by myself, one by somebody else, two upgrades from 13.04 one a fresh install, on all three systems the same story). With telling the clock to display UTC the whole mess of time zone issues pops up to the user level. And to stress it again, this is a new feature of 13.10. I do not rember that I had this issue on any other Linux distro which I used and I started somtimes in the 1990ies ...

I am honest to say that I could not care less about all this as long as I manage to get the sytems which I am using to do what I want to have. But what I can assure you is that the whole issue with time and time zones is messed up in 13.10 and it is very likely that users who are not really fans of KDE and kubuntu will just turn its back to it when they run into this mess ...

[SteveRiley]

And force these operating systems to be like Windows? Really?

[Snowhog]

Linux, MacOS, Android, iOS, minicomputers, and mainframes all "think" in UTC and only display local time.

True up until you, the user, change this.

[SteveRiley]

However, still, just as a comment: Why on earth did people decide that all users of Linux want to have GMT set as their system time?

When the computer is powered off, it has no idea where it is. It has an onboard clock in the firmware, so the computer can keep track of time. But which time zone? The computer has no way of knowing. When the computer is switched on, the computer can determine its location and set the time zone appropriately. How? Let's examine some alternatives.

(1) The firmware interrupts the boot process and asks the human, "Hey, where are we?" This is not a good idea, because not all systems boot with humans present.

(2) The firmware assumes a certain time (note, not time zone) -- namely, whatever the operating system told it the last time. This introduces a certain degree of unpredictability. What happens if you boot the computer in another time zone tomorrow? It immediately begins writing to journals and log files using the previous timezone, and can't change until a new time zone is configured. This creates synchronization problems.

(3) The firmware is set to a meaningful universal time -- UTC. The operating system asks the user for the timezone during setup, and calculates the current time by adding or subtracting the correct offset to or from UTC. The operating system exposes automated and manual methods for determining the current location and the current timezone, useful for changing the timezone as necessary (during travel, say, or these unusual times when localities change standard/daylight start/stop times and the software hasn't yet caught up).

I agree that it would be better that systems would know about the concept of time zones in the first place and operating systems actually should not deal with this issue.

The only operating system I know of that intentionally messes with the clock in the firmware is Windows. Linux, MacOS, Android, iOS, minicomputers, and mainframes all "think" in UTC and only display local time. BTW, a clumsy side-effect of Windows's behavior is that it must "reverse-calculate." Windows forces the firmware clock to the current time, and then performs all its internal timekeeping (filesystem stamps, etc.) using UTC. Then when time-based data is displayed, Windows has to calculate again.

Anyway the more astonishing thing about the whole issue is that it is actually Windows which offers the hack to tweak the situation in a manner which at least superficially makes the problem disappear. Usually it is Microsoft which is blamed to be stubborn but in this case it seems to be Linux.

No. The registry edit compels Windows to behave the same way as every other operating system. It also introduces a degree of instability, as some third party software actually bypasses the Windows clock and asks the firmware for the time. This software assumes that the firmware's time is local, which it now isn't.

And this stubborness was introduced between (k?)ubuntu 13.04 and 13.10.

No. The problem you're writing about has been a long-standing issue for anyone who dual-boots between Windows and any other operating system.

[kufischer]

Hi Teunis,

thanks for your reply. Apologies for the delay in my reply but I only now found the ttime to come back to this.

Thanks for the link http://lifehacker.com/5742148/fix-wi...ting-with-os-x it seems that it solved the problem for me.

It does possibly not make much sense to complain about how can I say, well, stupid ideas that are around these days and seem to bother people around the world and especially not to you because your help made me come around the pitfalls other people install. Question is of course why are those other people doing things like this.

I don't want to be hard on the Linux community because basically Linux is the main system that I have in use and I would now know how to do my work without it.

However, still, just as a comment: Why on earth did people decide that all users of Linux want to have GMT set as their system time? I definitely agree that it is not a real bad idea to have a common representation of time around the world. But as long as system time itself does not seem to support time zones, anybody switching on a "virgin" machine would set system time to local time on not to GMT (unless of course (s)he happens to live there). I mean in this case at BIOS level without any operating system support. I agree that it would be better that systems would know about the concept of time zones in the first place and operating systems actually should not deal with this issue. However, at least as far as I can see the world seem to look different ...

Anyway the more astonishing thing about the whole issue is that it is actually Windows which offers the hack to tweak the situation in a manner which at least superficially makes the problem disappear. Usually it is Microsoft which is blamed to be stubborn but in this case it seems to be Linux. And this stubborness was introduced between (k?)ubuntu 13.04 and 13.10. If I could, I would nominate the guy in charge for an award ... how about the "worse than Windows" award ...

Whether comments like mine will make this guy change his mind, I cannot tell. All I can tell is that decisions like the one we look at do not improve the experience of users and also do not do Linux in favour because people who are regular Windows users and only try Linux to see whether it is useful will immediately turn away when running in such issues.

Still thanks again for you hint. You made my life a bit more easy again ...

Best regards,

Klaus

[Teunis]

Aha, this could be due to the different ways Windows and Linux save their time.
Windows uses GMT to set it's clock time , while Linux uses UTC (the BIOS uses UTC too hence the BIOS and Linux clock's are the same).

http://lifehacker.com/5742148/fix-wi...ting-with-os-x

I have not had the need to edit anything but this might be the solution for you:
http://askubuntu.com/questions/29775...ooting-kubuntu

[kufischer]

Hi Teunis,

thanks for your reply. However, I am not sure whether you understood what I wanted to say. Neither I am not sure whether I understood what you wanted to say.

Anywas, I DO KNOW HOW TO CHANGE TIME SETTINGS, at syste level (BIOS) as well as in Linux and Windows.

The problem I am complaining about is that Linux (i.e. in my case kubuntu and I am sure it is Linux and nothing else on my machine) always messes up system time setting. If I change the BOIS my time to the correct local time in Germany and boot into my kubuntu install, first of all the clock shows a time which is one hour early. After a while it snapps back to local time. ALTHOUGH I DID SWITCH OF AUTMATED TIME SYNCHRONIZATION. If I then check the BIOS time again it is now one our late,

As I write kubuntu shows my as time zone CEST which is definitely NOT CORRECT and this is not just a display error. kubuntu is very serious about its opinion and switches BIOS time to what it believes to be correct despite the obvious fact that this is not consistent with the official time all people seem to believe in.

I am not sure whether I understand what you wanted to say by "At the moment I just select some tropical place in the same time zone that only uses standard time" Do you mean that you experience similar problems and use as a workaround a setting which just displays the system time of the BIOS. If this is what you wanted to say, I would be interested to know which place you chose.

Thanks for your help,

Klaus

[Teunis]

There are at least two ways to set your time, via the system settings and via the clock on the task bar.
I travel quite a bit and have come to use the options in the clock.

Right click the clock and select Set Digital Clock (I don't have an English version so the title might be different)
Then select Time Zones.
You can enter something like Euro in the search bar and select the nearest city, Berlin is an option for CET.

Make sure there are no further cities tagged!
If there are others tagged you can switch between them by hoovering your mouse over the clock and scroll using the middle mouse button.

Now I must admit I haven't come across an elegant option to disable off automatic Summer/Winter time switches, something I need to disable for my work.
At the moment I just select some tropical place in the same time zone that only uses standard time

[kufischer]

Hi,

I don't know if anybody cares about this but it feels like the guy who is responsible for time in unbuntu (or maybe only in kubuntu, I cannot tell) has completely gone mad. If anybody listening and knowing who is responsible for this (I mean time zone settings and maintenance for Western Europe), I would really appreciate if I could know how to contact this guy and ask him whether he or she is serious about what is happening.

Thanks for your help,
best regards,

Klaus

[kufischer]

Hi there,

I am not sure whether this is the right place to ask my question but I did not find any other reasonable place and at least it seems that people in this thread discussed the problem which I currently have. I do not understand why kubuntu 13.10 messes up time zones basically on all of my installs. When I open the time settings in kde ubuntu tells me I am set to CEST (and this end of November!!!!). I did not find any option to change to CET explicitly. Addtionally, it is clearly not just a display bug of kde because the system time is actually set to CEST i.e. one hour early than the displayed time after I boot and this messes up the time for Windows which of course just displays the system time assuming that it is set correctly to the time in the time zone where the machine believes to sit.

Am I the only one experiencing this problem with kubuntu 13.10.

Thanks for your help,

Klaus

[herouth]

You mean change the global timezone to a fixed zone like Etc/GMT+3 instead of Asia/Jerusalem?

The problem is not myself personally. For my own Kubuntu at work, I've already compiled the Jerusalem zicfile. At home I'll do the same if I don't see a fix from Ubuntu in the next few days. But there are many people with Ubuntu systems around here, and I'm not sure all of them are aware of the problem.

[tek_heretik]

In the meantime, you can disable automatic daylight savings time, etc, that's what I do if there is a conflict.

[herouth]

Thank you for your reply and the links you provided. I filed a bug report at Launchpad, and I can only hope it will take less than 2 weeks to process.

[Rog132]

If you think that a package is not up to date then you could make a bug report.

Ubuntu package archives =Kubuntu package archives = Xubuntu package archives =Lubuntu package archives =...

tzdata packages: http://packages.ubuntu.com/search?ke...ll&section=all

Reporting bugs (Kubuntu): https://wiki.kubuntu.org/Kubuntu/Bugs/Reporting
Reporting bugs (Ubuntu): https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ReportingBugs

tzdata bug reports, Launchpad: https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/tzdata/+bugs