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4. Miscellaneous problems

4.1 Time zone

Denmark is placed in the Central European Time zone (CET or MET,) which (in the winter) is equivalent to Greenwich Mean Time plus 1 (GMT+1.) You set the time zone on a Linux system by making a symbolic link between /usr/lib/zoneinfo/localtime and the file in /usr/lib/zoneinfo/ with a name corresponding to your zone or country. Danes will want to execute one of the commands

ln -sf /usr/lib/zoneinfo/MET /etc/localtime

or

ln -sf /usr/lib/zoneinfo/Europe/Copenhagen /etc/localtime

This automatically sets Daylight Saving Time (GMT+2) in the summer.

You synchronize the system time with the CMOS clock by issuing the command clock as root. If your CMOS clock is set to GMT (a.k.a. UTC --- the standard on proper Unix systems) use

clock -u -s

or if your CMOS clock is set to local time use

clock -s

4.2 A4 papersize

• ghostscript: Add the command line option -sPAPERSIZE=a4.
• ghostview: Define the following Xresource:

  Ghostview.pageMedia:  A4
  

• TeX/LaTeX, dvips, xdvi: See the entry for TeX/LaTeX in section International character sets in specific applications.

4.3 Text file formats for other platforms

You can translate files between an ISO-8859-1 formatted text file and e.g. a DOS text file using codepage 850 with the recode package. A DOS file called foo.txt would be translated into a proper Unix file with the command

recode cp850:latin1 foo.txt

recode is available as recode-3.4.tar.gz from all mirrors of the GNU archive.

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