Very Computer

I mistakenly selected the GMT setting during install now my time is
all screwed up if I set the time back to EST in CMOS i get all kinds
of error messages regarding the time. ( files have future date and
such)

Q: Where do I set the environment variable to tell Linux I'm in the
Eastern Time Zone?

TIA

Jim

On redhat systems it is determined by following symbolic link.

    /etc/localtime -> ../usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/Amsterdam
    /usr/share/zoneinfo/localtime -> ../../../etc/localtime
    /usr/share/zoneinfo/posixrules -> localtime
    /usr/share/zoneinfo/posixtime -> localtime

Keep the cmos clock on UTC time and it will work perfectly.

Villy

No, you did not read the original item closely enough.  Mark yourself
down 2 points for reading comprehension.  The whole point is that he
did set it up the way you recommend, but now wants to switch it back
to having his CMOS be on local time (which, I assume, is USA EST).

It is certainly true that Unix systems work best (least surprises)
when the internal clock is on GMT and all conversions to
local/DST/SummerTime/whatever is done in software.  However, doing
this causes pain for those of us who do, occasionally, have to boot
our PC's into less well designed OS's.  It is for this reason that I
recommend against the UTC solution and can see where the original
poster is coming from.

As for how to fix it, "man 8 clock" ought to get you started.
Basically, anywhere in your startup scripts where it does something
like "clock -u", you need to remove the -u.

Yeah, what Villy said.

But, you will have the problems with files being dated in the future.
Solution is to run "date" and do an "echo $TZ"
this will tell you what your TIMEZONE environment variable is set
to now, and what the system clock is set too.

Check your system clock.  figure out how many hours it is in the future.

Set the system clock to UTC (pretty much the same as GMT)
Then turn of the system for the number of hours the clock was set ahead.

When you next turn on your system everything will be OK.

-Ben.