something should confirm that the current time is accurate

[Mark Shuttleworth]

The default install mode of Warty is to take over the machine. We can decide
ourselves that the policy is for the hardware clock to reflect GMT, and set it
accordingly. This question is not needed.

Later, we can try ntpdate to set the date using known-good network services. And
failing that, we can ask the user to confrm the local time if we want to make
sure that is accurate, when we set the timezones would be a good idea.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

base-config (2.35ubuntu6) warty; urgency=low

  * Colin Watson
    - tzsetup: Drop priority of tzconfig/gmt question (#415).
    - lib/menu/timezone: Stop telling tzsetup to default to non-UTC. This
      means that we'll take our default from rcS in initscripts instead,
      which sets UTC=yes (#415).

 -- Colin Watson <email address hidden> Thu, 29 Jul 2004 14:52:20 +0100

I'm leaving this bug open as an enhancement request to confirm that the current
time is accurate, using ntpdate or otherwise as you mentioned.

[Phil Bull (philbull)]

Is this still an issue with Breezy/Dapper?

[Lakin Wecker (lakin)]

Marking as needs info until someone can confirm that the bug has been fixed or still exists. (Please mark as such when you do).

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

Yes, this bug still exists in Dapper.

[trollord (trollenlord)]

On Feisty, UTC is default.

The resulting time based on user's selection will be shown, but not verified from user at the installation phase. Also there isn't ntp run even for once as a client. Shouldn't this go to correct (still existing) package, ubiquity?

[Mark Shuttleworth (sabdfl)]

Running NTP once in the background would be useful, yes!

[Eric Katz (eric-katz)]

My clock sometimes runs slow in KUBUNTU 7.10, but the NTP check-box ("adjust time automatically") is marked in the adjust date and time dialogue. When I tell it to update, it works, but then it slows down again. It's almost as if NTP is lazy and doesn't run unless you tell it to. Is this a KDE problem or is it *ubuntu-wide?

[David Tomaschik (matir)]

Eric:

Install the 'ntp' package if you haven't already. This installs a background daemon called 'ntpd' which periodically updates the system clock with much higher regularity than normal. (I'm not even sure how often ntp-client is run otherwise.)

[Adam Niedling (krychek)]

This is the oldest bug that's still open. No one dares to close it? :)
In Hardy you don't have the option to choose between UTC and local time. So shouldn't this bug be closed?

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

The guts of this were implemented in Debian a while back, in time for Ubuntu 8.04 (sorry, I should have closed this earlier):

clock-setup (0.90) unstable; urgency=low

  * Make the menu item to run before partman, depend on configured-network,
    and run rdate to pull time from NTP, as well as running tzsetup.
    Closes: #236673, #247484
  * Move the UTC question into the finish-install script.
  * Use hwclock to store the correct time to the system clock at the end of
    the install.
  * Since hwclock has been known to hang on problematic hardware, deal with
    hangs.
  * Add support for using the rtc-dev driver on the nslu2.
  * Remove old isinstallable file that was for sarge, we don't support sarge
    installs anymore.
  * Make whether to use NTP, as well as the server to use be asked as low
    priority questions, and preseedable.

  [ Updated translations ]
  * Bulgarian (bg.po) by Damyan Ivanov
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  * Simplified Chinese (zh_CN.po) by Ming Hua

 -- Joey Hess <email address hidden> Wed, 25 Jul 2007 13:38:23 -0400

Ubiquity also uses this. As of Intrepid (ubiquity 1.9.7), it even depends on rdate so should actually work! ;-) Note that it's run towards the end of the installation rather than in time for the timezone selection early on; this could potentially be improved in future, but the basic idea of this bug should now be fixed at long last.