On Sat, Aug 10, 2019 at 12:16:04PM -0500, David Wright wrote: > If you're desparate to get the timezone altered earlier in your > installation process, you could always do it manually: try switching > to VC2 and editing the file /target/etc/timezone to the string UTC > (the alternatives are simply the names of the files in > /usr/share/zoneinfo, including subdirectories). Obviously wait until > the file exists. (I've not tried this so I don't know when that is.)
I'm skeptical that this would be sufficient. Debian actually stores the system's default timezone in *two* different places, using two completely different mechanisms. I have been led to believe that one of these is "standard" for GNU/Linux-based systems, and the other is for backward compatibility. wooledg:~$ ls -ld /etc/*time* -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 46 Apr 10 2017 /etc/adjtime lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 36 Apr 1 08:58 /etc/localtime -> /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/New_York -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 17 Apr 1 08:58 /etc/timezone The first one is the /etc/timezone file, which as you say, is a simple text file that a (root) user can edit. I believe this is the backward-compatibility one. The second one is the /etc/localtime symbolic link, which needs to point to an existing binary time zone data file in /usr/share/zoneinfo. The symbolic link can be re-pointed by hand; the binary data file should not be edited by hand. Running dpkg-reconfigure tzdata changes both of these, so that all the programs work, regardless of which one they choose to honor. Manually changing just *one* of them would probably leave the system in an inconsistent state, where some programs display the correct time zone, and others do not. I don't have any kind of statistics for how many programs use one vs. the other. It's not trivial to find out.
