Mandriva changes time in Sabayon and Fedora? [Solved]

[popatopalous]

When I log out of Mandriva and boot into my Fedora or Sabayon partition the time gets changed in Fedora or Sabayon from local time to UTC. Any ideas as to what could cause this? To my knowledge all my Linux partitions [also Suse] are set to Hardware Time=UTC Local Time=USA MST. How do I check this? Does not happen when I boot out of Mandriva into Suse partition or any other permutation I've come up with. Also I don't know if this is something Mandriva is doing or something about how Fedora and Sabayon start ntp or ntpd or something else???

What I also need is the equivalent to 'dmesg' for what Mandriva is doing when I boot out of it? Or what other log or data could I provide to help solve this???

Fedora 'dmesg':

http://tempcode.com/6r

Sabayon 'dmesg':

http://tempcode.com/6s

[Fitzcarraldo]

Perhaps your CLOCK environment variable is different in Mandriva to SL and Fedora? I don't know where the CLOCK and TIMEZONE environment variables are assigned in Mandriva and Fedora, but in SL/Gentoo it is in the file /etc/conf.d/clock (mine is shown below as an example). It looks like you may have Mandriva configured to set the hardware clock to UTC.

Note that the System Clock and the Hardware Clock are two different things. You can find a good 'HowTo' for the Linux clock on the Web site http://www.loblolly.net/~rddecker/helpp ... mclock.htm

Code: Select all

# /etc/conf.d/clock

# Set CLOCK to "UTC" if your system clock is set to UTC (also known as
# Greenwich Mean Time).  If your clock is set to the local time, then
# set CLOCK to "local".  Note that if you dual boot with Windows, then
# you should set it to "local".

CLOCK="UTC"

# Select the proper timezone.  For valid values, peek inside of the
# /usr/share/zoneinfo/ directory.  For example, some common values are
# "America/New_York" or "EST5EDT" or "Europe/Berlin".

TIMEZONE="Europe/London"


# If you wish to pass any other arguments to hwclock during bootup,
# you may do so here.

CLOCK_OPTS=""

# If you want to set the Hardware Clock to the current System Time
# during shutdown, then say "yes" here.

CLOCK_SYSTOHC="yes"

# Newer FHS specs say this file should live in /var/lib rather than
# /etc.  If you care about such things, feel free to change this value.
# Note that a blank value means that you do not wish to even use the
# adjtime facility.  This is the default behavior as adjtime can be
# very fragile.  If the clock is updated without updating the adjtime
# file (which is common when using services such as ntp), then the
# clock can be screwed up when it gets updated at next boot.

#CLOCK_ADJTIME="/var/lib/adjtime"
#CLOCK_ADJTIME="/etc/adjtime"
CLOCK_ADJTIME=""


### ALPHA SPECIFIC OPTIONS ###

# If your alpha uses the SRM console, set this to "yes".
SRM="no"

# If your alpha uses the ARC console, set this to "yes".
ARC="no"

I dual boot with Windows XP but I have set CLOCK to "UTC", not "local" as specified in the comment in /etc/conf.d/clock, as I have configured the Windows XP clock to be UTC too, and also configured the SL clock to be UTC (by using Adjust Date & Time...). I can then right-click on the clock in the top Panel and use Show Timezone to select the time zone I happen to be in at the moment from a drop-down list of time zones I have previously specified, and then the clock displays the correct local time for that time zone. I used Show Timezone > Configure Timezones... to add the various time zones that I visit to the aforementioned drop-down list. This is very flexible and, by doing it this way, Linux will take care of daylight saving time correctly.

By the way, you can see what are acceptable time zones for the TIMEZONE variable by looking in /usr/share/zoneinfo and its subdirectories. Also have a look at the Gentoo Localization Guide: http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/guide-localization.xml

[popatopalous]

Thanks, Fitzcarraldo. First step appears to be to find the equivalent of '/etc/conf.d/clock' in Mandriva. Thanks for the links. I'm going to read System Clock How To now.

[popatopalous]

The problem was that hardware clock in Mandriva was set to local time. For solution:

http://forum.mandriva.com/viewtopic.php?t=78176

http://forum.mandriva.com/viewtopic.php?p=421195#421195

In other words:

Configure Your Computer > System > Manage Date and Time > Change Time Zone

Select the nearest city in your time zone and it will ask is your hardware clock set to GMT.

Simple. Thanks RJ549 and Fitzcarroldo.