Whenever I change from Fedora 8 or Windows XP to the new Fedora 9  or vice versa the time of my machine will change, it will go backward or forward with a fixed offset, and I knew it is a problem with timezone. So before I explain the problem I would like to mention that each machine has a clock that works even if the machine is turned off, using a battery that is connected to the motherboard, and when the operating system boots it will read the time from that clock.

For Windows OS, the time that is shown to you in the taskbar is the same time of the hardware clock, and when you change your time in Windows, it will update the hardware clock to reflect the same change. So let say that you are in a city with timezone ” -6 ” and Windows is set to that zone, then the hardware clock will have the time of that zone also. However, Unix, and Unix compatible OS like Linux, assumes the hardware clock to be set to the UTC “coordinated universal time” (which is also called GMT) and it will calculate the local time based on the selected timezone (by adding the offset to the time).

If you have a system with dual boot Windows and Linux you will have this problem, but lucky we are that Linux has the option to assume the hardware clock to be the local-time instead of UTC and it will ack like Windows and that will solve the problem.

So after remembering all of that I tried to loacate this option under my Feroa 9 which tells it to treat the machine clock as a local-time instead of UTC, but I could not find it any where, and after some digging I discovered that since I installed KDE4 only with my new installation, the tool that allows this is based on Gnome desktop and it is called “system-config-time”. But I am still wondering why KDE4 does not have a GUI for that!! even in the older version!!

So I installed this tool and I found that the option for UTC time is checked and I have to uncheck it to resolve the problem.

Unfortunately it did not work and it gave me an error message after I clicked the OK button and it did not change the settings:


File "/usr/lib/python2.5/shutil.py", line 41, in copyfile
raise Error, "`%s` and `%s` are the same file" % (src, dst)
shutil.Error: `/usr/share/zoneinfo/America/Chicago` and `/etc/localtime` are the same file


Finally after more google search I found this command line program “timeconfig” (which is text version of the system-config-date) which I used to successfully change the way Linux uses the time stored in my machine.

From my understanding, both tools the GUI “system-config-date” and the text based “timeconfig” are developed by Redhat, and since they use Gnome as their default destop management they tend to build their tools based on that. However, I like KDE more since it provides me with things that Gnome can’t. So do I have to suffer for that?

Is this Redhat problem or KDE should develope all of these things?

Any way, I am happy now that my problem is fixed, but I hope the option will be available in KDE 4.1.