GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 357989
We need a GUI to enable/disable utc
Last modified: 2009-09-18 15:43:43 UTC
Hello, this is an enhancement requested by an Ubuntu user. The Ubuntu bug report is at http://launchpad.net/bugs/53132 . "Currently utc is causing people problems as they might not understand what it does if enabled during the installation and they want to change the setting later when they experience problems. Example of such problem is when user has a dualboot machine, where Windows and Linux are in different time, because utc is enabled. ( I recently fixed such problem myself. ) Obvious place to look for such setting is the date & time settings, so we should add there an option where utc could be enabled or disabled." Thanks for taking this into consideration. Other information:
I'm suffering from this issue at the moment: The Ubuntu installer doesn't detect the presence of an OpenSolaris install, and defaults to setting the system clock to UTC. As a result, OpenSolaris puts me four hours in the future ever time I use Ubuntu. The first place I looked in both installs to remedy this situation was the Time and Date dialog. Some googling finally led me to /etc/default/rcS so I was able to change it, but mere mortal end users shouldn't have to know about /etc/default/rcS -- and/or whatever the equivalent is in OpenSolaris. :-) Therefore, it would be awesome if GST could add an option to enable/disable UTC. Thanks!
I don't like the idea of putting this kind of techie option in our main dialog. Most users won't need it, and it will add a non-negligible overhead to the simple task of setting time. Most people won't understand this option, and people that do are most likely able to edit the config file. Since the cases where using UTC is bad are clearly identified, the system should rather detect when another (incompatible) OS is installed, and not use UTC. So I'd say WONTFIX, unless somebody proves me that the latter solution is too complex (and is ready to implement it :-p ).