On brand new install of Ubuntu 8.04, I issued the command to change time: sudo dpkg-reconfigure tzdata

That got me a blue screen with a gray box on it and the words package configuration at the top of the gray box. Inside the box is code...lqqqqqq etc.

So instead I used tzselect. That did bring up the time zone prompts. What confused me was at the end it said, "You can make this change permanent for yourself by appending the line
TZ='America/Los_Angeles'; export TZ
to the file '.profile' in your home directory; then log out and log in again.

Can someone tell me if I'm doing this correctly before I upload to server? I can't find anyone else that has had this situation:

# ~/.profile: executed by Bourne-compatible login shells.

if [ "$BASH" ]; then
if [ -f ~/.bashrc ]; then
. ~/.bashrc
fi
fi

mesg n
TZ='America/Los_Angeles'; export TZ

If you want to change the time zone globally do the following

mv /etc/localtime  /etc/localtime-old
ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/UTC /etc/localtime

Where UTC is the new timezone

Yes, that's the right way of doing it.


And that sounds like you tried to run it in the ajax console, and not over SSH (regular or to LISH, doesn't matter).

TY for the help rsk>

I ran the command over SSH using Tunnelier, a ssh2 client, terminal console. Is it really using secure channel? Key exchange occurs. And, I ran it again to see the log of connect'ng steps:

21:04:49.100 Starting a new SSH2 session.
21:04:49.190 Connecting to SSH2 server 69.164.205.139:22.
21:04:49.360 Connected.
21:04:49.550 Starting first key exchange.
21:04:50.482 Server version string: SSH-2.0-OpenSSH_4.7p1 Debian-8ubuntu1.2
21:04:52.575 New host key received. <snip>
21:04:55.279 Authentication completed.
21:04:55.619 Auto opening SFTP session.

??

Yes, it is an SSH connection. Still, apparently the client you're using is not providing a proper full-screen emulation as it should.

Try Putty for a change.

If you're connecting through LISH emergency console (linodeXXXXX@datacenterXX.linode.com), make sure to set your program's window size to 80x24, and type

TERM=vt100
export TERM

after login and before the call to dpkg-reconfigure.
If you're using a regular connection to your sshd (yourlogin@yourlinodeaddress) it should not be necessary.

In any case, you can try falling back to Debconf's text interface, which has a better chance of working in a misconfigured terminal:

dpkg-reconfigure -freadline tzdata