No, those aren't major things, but I'm very lazy.
Using UTC time is quite easy - set the hardware clock to UTC time, and then whenever you use the hwclock program to read or set it, add the --utc option instead of the --localtime option. There are only three places in Puppy where that command is used: /usr/sbin/timezone-set, /usr/sbin/set-time-for-puppy, and /etc/rc.d/rc.country.
Rather than hardcoding it, I figured it would be best to just make it optional, so weirdos like me can use UTC while everybody else can use local time. So what I did was add a file named /etc/clock, which sets the variable "$HWCLOCKTIME" to either 'localtime' or 'utc'. Then the three scripts listed above can just include /etc/clock and use the variable to set the time based on the user's choice.
The patch I provide here makes those changes. It defaults to using localtime, so you'll still have to edit /etc/clock if you want to switch it. The patch is applied by extracting it and then using the patch program with the -p 1 option in /. For example, if I downloaded the patch directly to /, I'd run these commands:
Code: Select all
cd /
gunzip optional_utc_time.patch.gz
patch -p 1 < optional_utc_time.patch
That's the most reliable way to install these changes. Even if you've made other modifications to the three files it modifies, unless those changes interfere with the very few lines modified, they will be preserved.
If you want to know what exactly is changed, read the patch.
For those who don't know, a patch is simply the output of the "diff" command. They are human-readable. You just extract it and open it in Geany. Geany will even apply syntax highlighting. The lines to be added are in green and those to be removed are in read. (There is no concept of modifying a line - it is removed and replaced with the new line). So you can read them to find out what exactly is going to happen ahead of time.