GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 696303
timezone setting is ignored
Last modified: 2013-03-22 18:15:53 UTC
The gnome-initial-setup wizard asks for your city so it can set a timezone, but this setting is ignored. The new user has the same timezone as the system default. I'm on Fedora 19 pre-release with gnome-initial-setup-0.8-3.fc19.x86_64 My system is set for US/Central time, and I created 2 new users, one for Paris, France, and another for Tokyo, Japan, and both users show US/Central time. In fact, I don't even see a timezone setting in the AccountsService file: [root@localhost ~]# cat /var/lib/AccountsService/users/tokyo [User] Language= XSession= PasswordHint=[Invalid UTF-8]
we're not setting any per-user timezones in GNOME, both the control-center and the initial-setup should set the system-wide timezone.
Oh, it's supposed to be system-wide? Well, that didn't work either. As I mentioned, I tried initial-setup twice, once with Paris and once with Tokyo, but my system is still US Central: $ md5sum /etc/localtime /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/Chicago d0f076c9f390e7d8a933cc7cc1ad2e90 /etc/localtime d0f076c9f390e7d8a933cc7cc1ad2e90 /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/Chicago
Does calling "$ timedatectl set-timezone Asia/Tokyo" work for you?
No, it's still US Central after running 'timedatectl set-timezone Asia/Tokyo' I think I see the problem, though. On my system, /etc/localtime is a copy of the /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/Chicago file. I looked at the Fedora 19 Gnome 3.8 Test Day ISO image and I see that /etc/localtime is a *symlink* to /usr/share/zoneinfo/US/Eastern. As long as /etc/localtime is a symlink, then timedatectl works fine. But if you remove the symlink and copy a zoneinfo file to /etc/localtime, then timedatectl fails.
There were no errors from timedatectl, but I see it's part of systemd, which also includes a systemd-timedated daemon. I tried starting it and I see this in the logs: Mar 22 13:02:56 localhost systemd-timedated[1698]: /etc/localtime should be a symbolic link to a timezone data file in /usr/share/zoneinfo/. My system has been upgraded from older Fedora releases hence /etc/localtime is a real file and not a symlink. I guess this should be better handled by the update process.
Glad to see you got your issues resolved.