I set my TZ environment variable to EST8EDT and that did the trick.  Time
class>>now evaluates to the correct time.

Thanks for your help John and David.

Derek Brans
Nerd on a Wire
Web design that's anything but square
http://www.nerdonawire.com
mailto: brans at nerdonawire.com
phone: 604.874.6463
toll-free: 1-877-NERD-ON-A-WIRE
----- Original Message -----
From: "David T. Lewis" <lewis at mail.msen.com>
To: "The general-purpose Squeak developers list"
<squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org>
Sent: Saturday, June 07, 2003 7:47 AM
Subject: Re: Time now and system time


> On Fri, Jun 06, 2003 at 10:51:53AM -0700, Derek Brans wrote:
> > I'm running a recent version of Debian.
> >
> > When I type "date" at the shell prompt I get this:
> > Fri Jun  6 10:47:11 PDT 2003
> >
> > When I evaluate "Time now" in the Squeak image I get this:
> > 18:47
> >
> > The shell time is correct.  I changed the timezone on my machine since
the image has been alive.  Squeak seems to be showing me the time without
the timezone difference, ie UCT.
> >
> > How do I get Squeak to show the same time as the system time?
>
> My guess is that you have set up your system as if it were a real
> computer instead of a PC, and your BIOS clock is set to UTC rather
> than local time. Squeak is dumb with respect to time zone offsets,
> and it is probably giving you the value of "now" in a UTC time zone.
>
> For the Unix VM, getting the current time works like this:
>
>  Time class>>now
>   Time class>>dateAndTimeNow
>    Time class>>millisecondClockValue
>     Time class>>primMillisecondClock
>      <primitive: 135>
>       primitiveMillisecondClock()
>        ioMSecs()
>          gettimeofday()
>
> I certainly am not going to suggest that you set up your computer
> incorrectly in order to make Squeak happy, but you might be able to
> get by with a workaround of hacking an offset into one of the Time
> class methods. I'd be interested to know if you come up with a
> workable hack (I'm not going to try it on my system, which is set
> up with a BIOS clock set for local time).
>
> John McIntosh's suggestion of looking at the TZ shell environment
> might also provide a workaround, if you can set it to some value
> that makes Squeak happy and do it only for Squeak. That is, set
> the TZ in a shell script that would run Squeak.
>
> If you're curious about the gory details of time zones, try loading
> TimeZone from Squeak Map. You can load all of the world's time zones
> from your Debian system's /usr/share/zoneinfo files and find out
> more than you ever wanted to know about them.
>
> HTH,
> Dave
>
>
>
>