Old Red Hat Linux Time Zone Fix (2007)

Most of the United States and Canada have recently changed the rules for Daylight Savings Time, so that the hour change now occurs earlier in the spring and later in the fall.

Any computer operating systems released or updated in the past couple of years should know about this. But older systems might not. In particular, old versions of Red Hat Linux may not change to Daylight Savings Time on the correct date.

A simple fix for that is to replace (as root) your Red Hat system's file /etc/localtime by this localtime replacement file. (Of course, save a backup of the previous file first!) This file was taken from Red Hat 9.0, but it also works with Red Hat 7.2 and presumably many other versions too. (To see what version of Red Hat you are running, type "cat /etc/redhat-release").

Once you have replaced that file, you can test if your computer now displays the time correctly by typing e.g. "date".

Note that there are other discussions and solutions of this issue on the web, e.g. here and here.

-- Jeffrey Rosenthal (contact me), with thanks to Alan J Rosenthal.