Unfortunately I live in the UK, where 6 months of the year, the time
is GMT. Now is the time of year when I discover which of my servers don’t
have the right timezone configuration and show the wrong time during
daylight saving. For future reference, here’s how
to set the timezone to Europe/London rather than UTC.

root@cms01:/tmp/openssl-0.9.8g# date
Mon Mar 31 08:23:35 GMT 2008
root@cms01:/tmp/openssl-0.9.8g# tzconfig
Your current time zone is set to GMT
Do you want to change that? [n]: y

Please enter the number of the geographic area in which you live:


   1) Africa         7) Australia

   2) America        8) Europe

   3) US time zones     9) Indian Ocean

   4) Canada time zones    10) Pacific Ocean

   5) Asia           11) Use System V style time zones

   6) Atlantic Ocean    12) None of the above


Then you will be shown a list of cities which represent the time zone
in which they are located. You should choose a city in your time zone.

Number: 8

Amsterdam Andorra Athens Belfast Belgrade Berlin Bratislava Brussels
Bucharest Budapest Chisinau Copenhagen Dublin Gibraltar Guernsey Helsinki
Isle_of_Man Istanbul Jersey Kaliningrad Kiev Lisbon Ljubljana London
Luxembourg Madrid Malta Mariehamn Minsk Monaco Moscow Nicosia Oslo Paris
Podgorica Prague Riga Rome Samara San_Marino Sarajevo Simferopol Skopje
Sofia Stockholm Tallinn Tirane Tiraspol Uzhgorod Vaduz Vatican Vienna
Vilnius Volgograd Warsaw Zagreb Zaporozhye Zurich

Please enter the name of one of these cities or zones
You just need to type enough letters to resolve ambiguities
Press Enter to view all of them again
Name: [] London
Your default time zone is set to 'Europe/London'.
Local time is now:      Mon Mar 31 09:23:48 BST 2008.
Universal Time is now:  Mon Mar 31 08:23:48 UTC 2008.

More information is available in the Debian
System Administrator Manual
.

I’ve been running Hardy on my workstation for a while and had
recently noticed that I was failing to type a space after “I”. I was
doing it far too much for it to just be me failing to press the space
bar properly, and it wasn’t happening after any other letter. After a
little bit of experiementing, I discovered that something was eating
shift-space. What was happening was that I was failing to release the
shift key quick enough after typing “I” and before I hit the space bar,
so it wasn’t getting passed on.

Turns out that the problem was a recent update of Hardy installed
SCIM, which uses
shift-space as a keyboard shortcut. To turn it off, load the SCIM Setup
program and go to the FrontEnd Global Setup screen and remove
“Shift+Space” from the Trigger hotkey.

Caused confusion for a few minutes. 🙂