Comment 4 for bug 8088

(In reply to comment #3)
> Setting the clock to UTC is making the assumtion that windows, or other i386
> based OS, will never be installed on that hardware in the future.

Windows, or perhaps OS/2. There are actually more i386 operating systems which
use UTC than not (Linux, all of the BSDs, Solaris/x86). It really is the more
sensible approach.

> Is there anything *wrong* with sticking to localtime + is_dst on an i386 system?
> (or am I wrong in thinking that the time is stored as epoch + a boolean dst bit?)

I have never seen an i386 system capable of keeping track of DST in the hardware
clock. The information just isn't there.

> Windows XP boxes will generally reset their time to a timeserver. Ubuntu's
> default NTP setup will refuse to change this in most timezones because the
> delta is too great. The end result looks like Ubuntu is broken.

Perhaps you're confusing ntpdate with ntpd? The default setup in Ubuntu uses
ntpdate, which doesn't care one whit if you want to skew your clock by seconds
or years.

Here's some information on the subject of storing time in the hardware clock:

http://www.linux.org/docs/ldp/howto/Clock-2.html