Help me please! This is not a serious problem but a really annoying one. I feel like a huge idiot for this, but we all make mistakes right! :-)

When I installed LM8, there was a question during the install screens regarding setting the system's clock. I don't remember the exact question, something about the time zone or GMT or something. You had to answer YES or NO to the question by clicking on the appropriate button.

I remember it said "if you have MS Windows installed on this computer, CLICK NO" and of course I must have clicked on YES with out paying attention because now my clock in Windows and Linux are 4 hours apart even though they are both set to EST. Also, even if I change the time zone on one of the OSes, the clock is still always 4 hours wrong.

The reason I want to fix this is because in Linux you have to be root to change the clock and I hate always having to su. Plus its super annoying.

It took so long to configure my Mandrake just the way I want, I don't want to re-install. Any ideas?????

Thank you in advance.

I had the same problem...all I did was click on the clock below right corner in Mandrake 8 and changed it that way to the right time zone....doing that it adjusted my MS clock when I logged into windoze

Thanks for the reply... I have reset my Linux clock and that works fine, but then when I go into Windoze.. my clock is four hours fast. If I reset it in Windows, it will then be four hours slow in Linux.. this is *independent* of what the time zone is or how many times I log on.

Please, help... there must be a way to undo this without reinstalling!

Anyone?

IIRC, this might have to do with whether your system clock uses universal (GMT) time, or UTC. In /etc/sysconfig/clock, I have

UTC=false

If yours says true, you might try to edit (as root) to have it say false.

Oftentimes, doing a search here:

http://groups.google.com/

for some keywords related to your problem will turn up the solution.

Thank you, I am sure that this is the case!! I knew it would be something simple like this! I will try it on Monday and let you know.

Thanks again

I just went through a little accelerated hair loss over this time deal. I found the boot messages declaring the system clock being set to UTC and the little clock applet was 7 hrs off so I went straight to /etc/sysconfig/clock and found UTC=false --> much hair pulling activity --> long story short, I went to DrakConf > System > Date & Time, ran through the settings, even though they showed what I want, and, at one point, a dialog pops up asking, "Is your hardware clock set to GMT?", where I say no and everything is groovy again.

I think I get in trouble when I go snooping through the configuration gui tools without setting things and stuff comes out not good

Anyway, just another datum in case the other one is not the right one. Good luck.

Well, I have tried setting UTC to false (it *was* set to true) and we'll see how it goes when I boot up next time.

thanks for your help!!

This is talking about the bios clock or hardware clock being set to UTC or GMT whatever. As you are using windows on the same machine the bios time is used in windows. So you must set hardware clock UTC false and also set proper time zone.


[root@beta sysconfig]# cat ./clock
ZONE="America/Chicago"
UTC=false
ARC=false

Well, I have set my clock to UTC=false, so far, so good... when I rebooted Linux, the time was 4 hours behind what it had been. (That's the time that Windows had). I then set the clock and time zone properly.

I have not booted into Windows since, but I am sure this fixed the problem. Thanks to everyone for your help.

:-)