17.8 Timezone

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Once a timezone is set the operating system’s time is determined as an offset from UTC (the Coordinated Universal Time).

The timezone will be automatically set if Location Services permissions are enabled. To enable Location Services permissions (normally already enabled), under Settings, choose Privacy and set Location Services on.

To set the timezone use the timedatectl command from the systemd, systemd package. A list of timezones is available with the list-timezones command:

$ timedatectl list-timezones 
Africa/Abidjan
Africa/Accra
Africa/Addis_Ababa
...
Asia/Seoul
Asia/Shanghai
Asia/Singapore
...
Australia/Melbourne
Australia/Perth
Australia/Sydney
Europe/Amsterdam
...
Pacific/Tongatapu
Pacific/Wake
Pacific/Wallis
UTC

To set the timezone for a specific region:

$ sudo timedatectl set-timezone Australia/Canberra

$ sudo timedatectl set-timezone Asia/Singapore

Then check the current time:

date

Another way to change the timezone of the operating system manually is to reconfigure the tzdata package. This will ask for the timezone, selected from a list of known regions.

$ wajig reconfigure tzdata

Current default time zone: 'Australia/Canberra'
Local time is now:      Sat 30 Nov 12:17:07 AEDT 2019.
Universal Time is now:  Sat Nov 30 01:17:07 UTC 2019.

The use of an older command, tzconfig, is deprecated.



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