Dear Friends,
If any of you get bored with this, you can please feel free to tell me to shut up - but I really love the distro, as things just plain work, and this is positively frustrating.
In an attempt to retrace the whole install, I took the following actions while still in grml live-
1. tzconfig to America/New_York
date revealed the local time, EDT, to be five hours earlier than UTC, and showed as well UTC as being the value obtained from my hw clock, which is, of course, set to local time.
2. clean reboot, using tzselect with posix value set as "NYC-0", date revealed local time to be CEST and utc to be what my hw clock says.
Thinking about this rationally, this can only mean that the live disk reports the hw clock as being UTC and there appears to be no way to tell it that this laptop BIOS is set to local time.
On the debian installer, for instance, it asks at install if the hw clock is set to utc. This is an urgent need, as there was some dreadful workaround in kanotix, which was also a pain.
Thus, the grml2hd needs one or two more questions, perhaps something like "is the bios clock set to utc?" and something like "location" as many config files set the locations as at.
In other words two things have to happen at hd install: 1. location has to be set as where it is, not at 2. we have to be able to tell the install that the BIOS clock settings are either UTC or localtime.
Now, I am am off to try to install again, with xorg 7 and fglrx drivers and see if I can get that to work.
Thanks again.
Best, M
"...children and young people feel instinctively the difference between those who genuinely wish them well and those who regard them merely as raw material for some scheme." --Russell