Problem with system time 2 hours off

[joneall]

I thought I had a problem with Kontact choosing the wrong time, but in fact it seem to have been using system time. According to System Settings, my time is 19:46 and is Europe/Paris time, the same as here in Lyon. However, the date command gives

$ date
Mon Apr 2 17:46:12 UTC 2007

and Kontact seems to use that time, so is 2 hours off. Why does date give UTC instead of the local time?

System Settings just lets you pick the zone by geographical name (Europe/Paris), but does not indicate the offset from UTC; even "the other system" does better than that.

What is going on here? Have the Unix people really tried to make setting time zones difficult or did it just happen that way?

[joneall]

Re: Problem with system time 2 hours off

After waiting in vain for help from the forum, I finally contacted a former colleague who is a Linux system administrator and he had the solution. You need to use the tzconfig command to set the time zone in /etc/timezone. Now date, Kontact and KDE all show the correct time.

[kubicle]

Re: Problem with system time 2 hours off

I'm glad you got it solved, even though your posts seem to have "fallen through the cracks" (happens on busy forums )

In situations like these (when you don't get an answer) one good option is to search the forums, in this case searching for "time zone", for example, would probably have directed you to the solution faster (than waiting for an answer).