[SOLVED] Timezones UTC and EDT all mixed up

Question

I have the following settings in rc.conf:
HARDWARECLOCK="localtime"
TIMEZONE="Eastern US"
The clock in the lower right panel does indeed indicate the time in EDT.  However, as a screensaver I use the big analog clock and I also put an analog clock in the Arch login window.  Both of these clocks show the time in UTC, i.e. 4 hours ahead of EDT.  What's worse, the time stamping of all saved files, logs, etc. is also in UTC, and the "date" command shows time in UTC.  I believe this is the result of my at one time having run
# date -u
How do I reverse this so that all clocks and timestamping are synchronized to EDT?
Last edited by RobF (2007-04-23 19:49:12)

Answer 1

"hwclock" gives the time in UTC.
After I ran hwclock, I went into the BIOS.  The date and time in the BIOS was set for UTC time.  I reset that to the EDT time and then did a warm reboot.  That didn't make any difference in Arch.
I do dualboot into Windows XP.  The time there is correct (i.e. shows it in EDT), both in the taskbar and when running "time" from the DOS CLI.
After resetting the BIOS and checking these things in Windows, I did a cold reboot into Arch.  Now, in Arch, the login clock and the screensaver clock show the correct time (in EDT).  The "date" as well as the "hwclock" command also give the correct time (in EDT) but they say that it's UTC!  However, the clock in the bottom panel now runs 4 hrs. behind.  When I right-click on this clock and choose "Adjust Date & Time", the "Configure - KDE Control Module" window that comes up shows the correct time (in EDT) and the entry "New York - America/US - Eastern Time" in the "change timezone" box is highlighted but underneath that box it says "Current local timezone: America/New York (UTC)".
When I highlight another entry in this change timezone box and then go back to the entry "New York - America/US - Eastern Time" and click on Apply, the clock in that box resets to 4 hours earlier.  When I then redial the clock to the correct EDT time (with the up and down buttons) and hit <Enter>, it shows the correct EDT time and the line underneath the change timezone box now reads "Current local timezone: America/New York (EDT)".  Also, the clock in the bottom panel now shows the correct EDT time.
When I now run the "date" command, it gives the time 4 hours ahead and says it's UTC (which is correct).  When I save a file, it's timestamped to this UTC time.  But I don't want to have all files and logs timestamped to UTC!!  hwclock now gives the correct EDT time but says that it's UTC!
It gets worse.  After making all of these changes, I did a cold reboot into Arch.  Now the login clock and screensaver clock are back again to running 4 hrs. ahead (i.e. giving UTC time), and similarly the date and hwclock commands again give the time 4 hrs. ahead and say it's UTC (which is correct).  And the KDE time & date adjust box again says "Current local timezone: America/New York (UTC)".  I.e. any adjustment I make through the KDE Control Center Module doesn't survive a reboot.  It looks as though the "date -u" command overrides everything.  If only I could reset the "date" command to printing EDT time (which I believe is the default that was used before I ran the date  -u command)!  I've looked everywhere but haven't found a way to undo this -u switch and return to the default.
FWIW, I should say that I installed OpenNTPD, and I'm now running the ntp daemon (ntpd) on startup.  I did this after I became aware of this time readout problem but running ntp didn't change anything.
Needless to say, I'm rather confused.