On Wed, Mar 05, 2003 at 12:32:40PM +0100, Ian Piumarta wrote:
> On Wed, 5 Mar 2003, Cristian Dumitrescu wrote:
> > that he happilly ran YDL 2.3 on his iBook. After a while he decided to make 
> > a dual boot system, installing OSX also. And surprise: every time he booted 
> > in YDL after that he had to connect to a time server in order to readjust 
> > the system time !!
> 
> I get this too.  There is about an 8-hour time difference between OSX and
> Linux on my tibook.  (If I fix it in one it breaks in the other.)  
> Setting the system clock to store GMT (or not) doesn't change anything.  

That doesn't sound like the same problem.  Cristian is describing (in my
interpretation, anyway) that the system clock will gain or lose time because
its idea of a second is not a real second.  You are describing a constant
time difference, but I'll bet your clock runs at the correct rate.

Are you using OSX to "set the system clock to store GMT"?  That may only
affect the time returned to programmers, but not the time in memory.
(In other words, you could be changing the action of software that only
OSX runs, not the hardware.)

> It's driving me nuts.  I think I'll just give up and tell Linux that I'm
> living 8 hours west of where I really am.  (Hmm, maybe Apple decided that
> the international date line really passes through Cupertino rather than
> Greenwich?)

You're not the only person with this problem.  Every version of UNIX that
I know of wants the system clock to always store GMT, while OS 9 (and
Windows, I think) stores the time in the local time zone.  (For me, that's
7 or 8 hours west of GMT, depending on dayligt savings.)  So AFAIK everyone
who dual-boots has this problem, unless they live at the Prime Meridian.

Right now I'm accommodating OS 9.  The time in NetBSD is wrong, unless I
lie and tell it I want the GMT time.  There's a system variable called
RTC_OFFSET which would allow me to tell NetBSD that the clock stores
local time, but it's not supported in the version of NetBSD I'm running.
I think I read that it recently became supported.  I'd have to reset
the clock, change the variable, and reboot NetBSD to handle daylight-savings
time, though.

So I'm curious how you are trying to tell OSX to use GMT, and why it's not
working.  I had hoped OSX would work like UNIX, being based on it.

-- Derek