Yar, this weekend, almost 2 full weeks earlier than years past, the sound of people waking up an hour late for Sunday morning Services (or work) will be heard across the country. If you’re operating on a windows based OS with automagic updates enabled, you’re covered. If your cell phone is set to use the network time, then providing your carrier is up-to-date, you’re covered. What about us Lee-noox users? Well, you can make sure you’re covered in a relatively simple way….

Open up an xterm (or aterm, or whatever term you like….) and type:

# zdump -v EST5EDT | grep 2007

The output should look exactly like this:

EST5EDT Sun Mar 11 06:59:59 2007 UTC = Sun Mar 11 01:59:59 2007 EST isdst=0 gmtoff=-18000
EST5EDT Sun Mar 11 07:00:00 2007 UTC = Sun Mar 11 03:00:00 2007 EDT isdst=1 gmtoff=-14400
EST5EDT Sun Nov 4 05:59:59 2007 UTC = Sun Nov 4 01:59:59 2007 EDT isdst=1 gmtoff=-14400
EST5EDT Sun Nov 4 06:00:00 2007 UTC = Sun Nov 4 01:00:00 2007 EST isdst=0 gmtoff=-18000

If that’s not the case, then do an ‘apt-get update; apt-get upgrade’ (if you’re on debian that is, you could probably do an emerge sync && emerge world on gentoo based systems…) and then run the command again. If that didn’t fix your issue, then there’s the NIH.gov technique (mind you this is all in the terminal:

1. su
2. cd /root
3. ftp elsie.nci.nih.gov
user: anonymous
pass: you@you.com
4. cd pub
5. ls
6. use ‘get’ to get the latest tzdata file like so:
get tzdata2007a.tar.gz
7. quit
8. mkdir tzdata
9. mv tzdata*.gz tzdata/.
10. cd tzdata
11. tar xzvf *.gz
12. cp /etc/localtime /etc/localtime.LAST
13. rm /etc/localtime
14. zic northamerica
15. ln -s /usr/share/zoneinfo/EST5EDT /etc/localtime
16. zdump -v /etc/localtime | grep 2007

It should show Mar 11 and Nov 4 as the new times, in my case. My example above is only for the east coast of USA. If that’s not you, then modify for your timezone. Sorry I don’t know about other timezones, but you can grep the /usr/share/zoneinfo directory to see what else is there….

Note: This info was gleaned from UbuntuForums. Props to the original poster!