[lug] Setting time zone

[George Sexton]

Uh, you should really select America/Chicago.

Three letter time zones don't always mean what you think.

I have had UK users select BST thinking it meant British Summer Time, 
but in the Olson db, it's Bering Standard Time. They would then call and 
complain the imports/exports were off by 10 hours.

Another problem is that some time zones like EST implicitly don't have 
Daylight savings time in them. There's no rule in those zones for it.

Really, really, follow the Continent/City convention for your time zone.

In your example, where you're creating the TZ setting, there's no 
accomodation for DST. 1st Sunday in November, your clocks will be off by 
an hour.

Gary Hodges wrote:
> On an Ubuntu system I'd like to set the time zone on a computer to CST. 
>  When I run "sudo tzselect" and go through the steps I get:
> 
> ------------------------
> Please identify a location so that time zone rules can be set correctly.
> Please select a continent or ocean.
>  1) Africa
>  2) Americas
>  3) Antarctica
>  4) Arctic Ocean
>  5) Asia
>  6) Atlantic Ocean
>  7) Australia
>  8) Europe
>  9) Indian Ocean
> 10) Pacific Ocean
> 11) none - I want to specify the time zone using the Posix TZ format.
> #? 11
> Please enter the desired value of the TZ environment variable.
> For example, GST-10 is a zone named GST that is 10 hours ahead (east) of 
> UTC.
> CST+6
> 
> The following information has been given:
> 
>         TZ='CST+6'
> 
> Therefore TZ='CST+6' will be used.
> Local time is now:      Tue Aug  5 09:42:30 CST 2008.
> Universal Time is now:  Tue Aug  5 15:42:30 UTC 2008.
> Is the above information OK?
> 1) Yes
> 2) No
> #? 1
> 
> You can make this change permanent for yourself by appending the line
>         TZ='CST+6'; export TZ
> to the file '.profile' in your home directory; then log out and log in 
> again.
> 
> Here is that TZ value again, this time on standard output so that you
> can use the /usr/bin/tzselect command in shell scripts:
> CST+6
> ------------------------
> 
> But I want to set the time zone globally, not just for a particular user.
> 
> Gary
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-- 
George Sexton
MH Software, Inc.
Voice: +1 303 438 9585
URL:   http://www.mhsoftware.com/