7.3. Configuring the setclock script

This setclock script reads the time from your hardware clock (also known as BIOS or CMOS clock) and either converts that time to localtime using the /etc/localtime file (if the hardware clock is set to GMT) or not (if the hardware clock is already set to localtime). There is no way to auto-detect whether the hardware clock is set to GMT or not, so we need to configure that here ourselves.

Change the value of the UTC variable below to a 0 (zero) if your hardware clock is not set to GMT time.

Create a new file /etc/sysconfig/clock by running the following:

cat > /etc/sysconfig/clock << "EOF"
# Begin /etc/sysconfig/clock

UTC=1

# End /etc/sysconfig/clock
EOF

Now, you may want to take a look at a very good hint explaining how we deal with time on LFS at http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/hints/downloads/files/time.txt. It explains issues such as time zones, UTC, and the TZ environment variable.