Am Mon, 16 May 2011 23:53:16 +0200
schrieb Tom Gundersen
The only time you need to set the timezone, is when you actually change timezone. It is therefore not necessary to do this at every boot.
Well, yes. I remember again.
To see a problem (as mentioned earlier): change your (system-wide) timezone in KDE, reboot, check timezone. Timezone was reset to whatever was in rc.conf (which was not updated when you updated your timezone in KDE).
But usually not in KDE. Doesn't KDE store its timezone setting separately from /etc/localtime?
As far as I know Gentoo does the same as Arch, I'm not sure what Ubuntu does and Fedora/OpenSuse do what I propose.
The simplest way is to do nothing at all during boot.
You only need to set the timezone at install and if it actually has changed, in which case you use a tool (gui/cli) or copy by hand to set /etc/localtime.
From your explanations and if I think about it again, you're indeed right. The timezone (/etc/localtime) indeed needs to be set only once at install. And if I continue thinking I think I can remember that I needed to symlink or copy the zoneinfo to /etc/localtime manually on Gentoo. Heiko