6

I recently installed 14.04, and decided to do so as a fresh install.

I wiped the only Ubuntu installation on the system, left a Windows 7 installation on, and installed over mdadm (once with /boot on mdadm and later with it not on mdadm as that saves a few other headaches. I'm pretty sure what I'm describing happened in both cases).

Everything from previous Ubuntu installations were completely wiped by manual formatting of the relevant partitions.

I'm in a time-zone currently on Irish Summer Time (UTC+01:00). Windows started jumping the time an hour ahead.

Now, I might expect a default Windows installation to jump the time an hour back, thinking the UTC bios time was the local time, but this was an hour ahead and I had RealTimeIsUniversal set in the registry to get some saner behaviour out of Windows.

After some puzzling over this, I realised that in /etc/default/rcS there was the line UTC=no to set Ubuntu onto local time rather than the normal UTC=yes.

This is a well-known setting for people who normally only use Windows as the illogical choice of local time (not unambiguous) means less change for them than fixing Windows in a way that MS don't support, but I certainly didn't set it.

This was easily fixed, but as I don't know what broke it, I don't know that it won't be broken again.

Is there anything that sets UTC=no upon use or installation, and if so can that be blocked?

1 Answer 1

3

If you install Ubuntu on a clean disk with no other OS, UTC=yes is used as default. In your situation, you have Windows aside Ubuntu. So in the installation Ubuntu detected Windows and set UTC=no. Although your Ubuntu is clean, the disk is not clean.

3
  • Well, that's pretty uselss if it's true. Does the same thing happen if there's a mix of Win and Linux?
    – Jon Hanna
    May 5, 2014 at 22:18
  • @JonHanna I think it's a compromise. As Win and Linux have different time switching, you have to choose one as default. May 7, 2014 at 13:31
  • which I had done. It decided to do what most linuxes do not do, and I can't see that choice documented anywhere.
    – Jon Hanna
    May 7, 2014 at 14:03

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .