Update for 2009 DST

As usual, the government has been late in announcing this year’s daylight savings time schedule. So late in fact that the change didn’t make it into the latest timezone file at elsie.nci.nih.gov which was last updated on the 6th of April.

Again, here are instructions for updating your Linux systems:

  1. Get the latest timezone data:
    wget ftp://elsie.nci.nih.gov/pub/tzdata2009e.tar.gz
  2. Extract the file for Asia:
    tar xzf tzdata2009e.tar.gz asia
  3. Edit the asia file and add these 2 lines below line 1596:
    Rule Pakistan 2009 only - Apr 15 0:00 1:00 S Rule Pakistan 2009 only - Nov 1 0:00 0 -
  4. Update the system timezone data for Asia:
    zic asia
  5. Copy the latest timezone file for Karachi (only required for Ubuntu and maybe other Debian derivatives):
    cp /usr/share/zoneinfo/Asia/Karachi /etc/localtime

That’ll automatically set your time an hour ahead at midnight on the 15th of April (this Wednesday). There has been no announcement on the end date as yet so we’ll assume it’ll be the same as last year. November 1st.

Enjoy the extra daylight.

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