I am trying to get my timzone set properly in Debian. I have been using Mandrake for over five years now and never had such problems as I am with Debian. I don't fully understand what Debian is doing with the timezone settings. I hope someone can explain it to me.

I have my BIOS clock set to local time. I am in Lethbridge. I want my timezone to be Canada/Mountain but I use Evolution for my PIM and it will only accept America/Edmonton. That is okey with me. I know that Edmonton is in the same timezone as Mountain. If I run tzconfig and set my timezone to Canada/Mountain then run "hwclock --hctosys" to get the clock set. I run date and see "Wed Aug 24 09:18:24 EDT 2005" that is the correct time but WTF is EDT. I was expecting to see MDT like Mandrake shows me. This also seems to be a problem with the UTC.

This is what I get on Mandrake
date; date -u
Wed Aug 24 09:22:35 MDT 2005
Wed Aug 24 15:22:35 UTC 2005

This is what I get on Debian
date; date -u
Wed Aug 24 09:21:54 EDT 2005
Wed Aug 24 13:21:54 UTC 2005

From reading dozens of pages where people are having problems with timezone settings in Debian I have found that this is most likely the cause of the problem I am having with Evolution. For the most part as long as my local time is correct I am happy but the time problem is doing very goofy stuff with Evolution. If I make an appointment in my calendar or set some event this is what happens.
Double click on a time say 9:00 AM. The event dialog shows up and it says that my event will be at 1:00PM the same day. Save the even and it will be scheduled to happen at 5:00 PM. Sync it to my Palm Pilot and the event is marked to be at 3:00 AM. Now that is some messed up stuff.

I have found a way to force the date command to produce the proper results. Debian is making a symlink from /etc/localtime to some timezone file in /usr/share/zoneinfo. By doing a md5sum on the Mandrake system and a search for a matching file on Debian I found that the proper file is in /usr/share/zoneinfo/posix/America/Edmonton and by manualy liking /etc/localtime to that file my date commands give the right times and zones. Evolution is still giving goofy times for events but I may have to reboot to fix that problem. I don't like this solution because tzconfig will not let me select the postfix files as my time zone.

I have checked and all my debs are upto date with Sarge.

Questions for Debian experts:
1) Why can't I select postfix timezones with tzconfig?

2) What should /etc/timezone say?

3) What is the problem with Evolution?


Roy Souther
www.SiliconTao.com
Let Open Source help your business move beyond.

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