[geeks] Re: BIOS & timezone interaction under Linux

[Gavin Hubbard]

Johnathan said:

"I'm not sure about Linux, but everywhere else this is a function of the
C runtime library.  The OS proper doesn't care about daylight savings
time, as it just worries about seconds after the Epoch; it's up to
userland code to interpret that value into something the end-user can
handle."


Speaking of which - did anyone else notice that the POSIX time_t counter 
exceeded passed 2^30 seconds at the end of last week? 

In anticipation of this event, I wrote a small shell script on my Powermac 
to monitor the counter and at the exact second it hit 2^30 the system 
started playing Wagner's The Ride of the Valkyries at full volume and 
opened a Safari window displaying http://www.timecube.com

This would have been pretty funny except that I didn't realise that the 
tick-over would occur on Saturday Jan 10 13:37:04 (UTC). Given that I 
live in NZDT (13 hours ahead of UTC at the moment) I got a fair surprise 
when my system roared into life at 02:37.04 on Sunday morning. 
Whoops.

Regards,

Gavin