From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.5) Gecko/20011014 Description of problem: I'm running my system dual booting Windows and RH Linux 7.2 So I must run my HW clock at local time to get correct dates in Windows. Using RH Linux 7.2, the clock is set wrongly when booting. The reason for this is the not yet mounted /usr filesystem when setting the clock. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Set the HW clock to local time 2. Install RH Linux with / and /usr on different partitions 2. Select a NON-UTC timezone (e.g. MEZ) 3. Reboot Notice that the system talks about (localtime) xxxxx UTC when setting the clock Actual Results: The clock is wrong (except you're in GB) Expected Results: The clock should be set correctly. Additional info: The reason for this is simple: The /etc/localtime is (AGAIN!) a soft link into /usr/share/zoneinfo. But the /usr filesystem is not yet mounted when the clock is set. So it can't find the time zone file and the clock gets set wrong because hwclock cannot open the "/etc/localtime" file. Your QA really suck. This is a so primitive error, you've should have caught it long long ago.It was present in some older versions of RH Linux, too. Possible solutions: - Force / and /usr on the same FS (bad idea) - Mount the tree containing /usr/share/zoneinfo before setting the clock (bad idea) - finally abandon the symlink idea and copy the time zone file into the /etc filesystem at install time. Unfortunately this is not easy fixable on existing systems.
What did you use to change the timezone?
I didn't change the time zone at all. I just installed the system with the RH installer from CD and selecte "MET" at the timezone selector in the install script. The installer creates a symlink which cannot be resolved unless /usr is mounted. I worked around this bug by removing the symlink and copying the file directly into /etc/localtime
I'm looking at the installer code here, it does: try: iutil.copyFile(fromFile, instPath + "/etc/localtime") except OSError, (errno, msg): log ("Error copying timezone (from %s): %s" % (fromFile, msg)) It copies the file. I'm not sure how you'd get a symlink there.