wrong time

[Daniel Robitaille]

On Thu, 28 Oct 2004 17:18:34 +0200, Davide Pesenti <mrjive at mrjive.it> wrote:
> hi *
> 
> even if the timezone is configured correctly and the result of the
> "date" command is right, the applet in the gnome panel shows a time that
> is 2 hours earlier than the right one.
> 
> how can this be correted?
> 

interestingly  I have been able to sort of reproduce this behaviour,
the output from the date command at first glance appearing of being
off by X hours from the one in the gnome applet.

It turns out that if you set the environment variable "TZ" to
something (but different from the default time zone in gnome), the
date command will end up in a different time zone than the
gnome-panel.  In my case, my gnome panel is on the US west coast time
zone, as it should be,  while as a test  adding the line "export
TZ=EST5EDT" in my .bashrc produces a date command output in the US
eastern time zone, 3 hours later.   Not a surprising result when you
think about it, but I haven't played with TZ in my environment in
quite a long time.

But of course it should be easy to sort that problem out by quickly
examining the actually time zone used by gnome-clock-applet and the
bash environment and the user figuring it out which one is right and
which one is wrong and correcting the one  set to the wrong time zone.