Daylight Savings Changes on linux systems

Might should have typed this up sooner, but... a while back I did an article on the daylight savings changes with regards to Windows 98 and how timezone editor tzedit could be used to make sure these OS's kept the correct time. Well, on the linux side of things there's not a lot to the fix either. Depending on the age of the install you may have an update available that addresses your daylight savings change, but if not... here's how to do it. wget 'ftp://elsie.nci.nih.gov/pub/tzdata2007c.tar.gz' - then tar -xzvf tzdata2007c.tar.gz....... then...

zic -d zoneinfo northamerica
cd zoneinfo
cp -r * /usr/share/zoneinfo/

(as root btw....) Then (in my case) I had to copy /usr/share/zoneinfo/EST5EDT /etc/localtime - your distro may just link the file (Make certain you pick the right timezone.)

There's a good article at techrepublic.com that got me the quick how-to. I had to change the downloaded filename as the one they referenced is no longer available.

The newer ubuntu systems I have dealt with the change gracefully (they've been released since the changes were enacted...) The older Mandrake/Mandriva systems needed a bit more attention (2006 is the most current Mandriva release I have and I still needed to link/copy the EST5EDT file.)