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I was running the CentOS installer, and was surprised that I couldn't find UTC when prompted for the timezone.

The only available choices are:

  • Etc/GMT
  • Etc/GMT±[1-12]
  • Etc/UTC

However, I recently learned that Etc/UTC is not the same as UTC.

So why is only Etc/UTC proposed and not UTC?

Community
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BenMorel
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    Can't you use `TZ='UTC-0'` which is a posix compatible TZ format in your `/etc/profile` (after installation of course)? – zero0 Mar 20 '13 at 09:52

3 Answers3

12

You should see a list of possible timezones in 

ls /usr/share/zoneinfo

at the top level should be UTC. To change the timezone of the server, you need to change (or set) the symbolic link /etc/localtime (after you found the location of UTC in zoneinfo directory above)

rm -f /etc/localtime
ln -s /usr/share/zoneinfo/UTC /etc/localtime

more info

Déjà vu
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  • Thanks for this info. Any idea why it's not proposed during installation, then? – BenMorel Mar 20 '13 at 11:41
  • On my system `UTC` is at the top - my guess is that 'etc' means the same as in '/etc' i.e. 'etcetera' (since UTC is not part of a continent, they had to put it somewhere if not at the top, *etc* sounds like a good destination on a Unix based system) – Déjà vu Mar 20 '13 at 11:46
6

Per IANA's time zone database, Etc/UTC is the specifier for the timezone whose display name is UTC -- that is, it's UTC. So the premise of your question is incorrect.

David Schwartz
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0

When installing CentOS you can select the Etc category then under city just scroll to the top and you'll see Coordinated Universal Time. This wasn't so obvious as a choice, seems like UTC should be a direct option under Region.

dotcomly
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