timezone info is forgotten at reboot

[Amit Shah]

My timezone is +0530 UTC. I store my local time in the BIOS. After upgrading from hardy to intrepid, my time always runs +0530 faster than my local time zone, making it in effect +1100 UTC.

Even after configuring the time with the 'date' command, this doesn't stay between reboots.

[tscott (tescott425)]

I am encountering a similar problem. I'm running Ubuntu 8.10 off of a pendrive (with persistent data enabled). Here are the steps / symptoms I'm seeing:

1) Set up the timezone, etc. and see the correct date/time reported on the toolbar. My timezone is "America/North_Dakota/Center". I've used "sudo dpkg-reconfigure tzdata" to set my timezone, and have confirmed that "/etc/timezone" matches my setting. Doing a 'diff -s /etc/localtime /usr/share/zoneinfo/`cat /etc/timezone`' indicates no difference (as expected).

2) Reboot.

3) The date/time on the panel bar now reads +0600 hours local time (local time = 9PM CST, panel bar time = 3AM") On the command-line 'date' similarly reads UTC instead of CST.

4) Go to System > Administration > Time And Date

5) "Time Zone" now is blank. In step 1) above, I had set it to America/North_Dakota/Center". /etc/timezone is still correct. However, 'diff -s /etc/localtime /usr/share/zoneinfo/`cat /etc/timezone`' now indicates a difference - this is unexpected. Doing a 'diff -s /etc/localtime /usr/share/zoneinfo/UTC' shows an identical match.

I'm guessing that something at either power-down or boot-up is forcefully updating /etc/localtime. Might be simply a matter of figuring out what and why.

[tscott (tescott425)]

Not a very elegant fix, but I can correct my problem if I copy the correct zoneinfo over from within /etc/rc.local. Example:

cp /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/North_Dakota/Center /etc/localtime

This works for me.

[Yaron (sh-yaron)]

The /etc/localtime trick is the way to go, is this still happening?

[Benjamin Drung (bdrung)]

Nowadays /etc/localtime is a symlink to the timezone data in /usr/share/zoneinfo. Do you still see the same problem with recent Ubuntu version or was it fixed since then?

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for tzdata (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]