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Bryan Agee
Asked: 2012-06-22 22:35:37 +0800 CST

How does the install process guess the timezone?

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Is it possible to use the same tool to have Ubuntu guess what timezone it is currently in?

This article mentions the feature I'm looking for (just above the second pic): http://www.linuxforu.com/2012/05/ubuntu-12-04-precise-pangolin-review/

installation

3 Answers

  1. Ubuntu uses the ubuntu-geoip package, which queries http://geoip.ubuntu.com/.

    You can python-geoip to achieve the same thing:

    import GeoIP
geo = GeoIP.new(GeoIP.GEOIP_MEMORY_CACHE)
ip = '200.100.50.0'
print geo.country_code_by_addr(ip)

    Sadly, it doesn't work with ipv6 yet.

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  2. Best Answer

    I decided to download the ubiquity source and dig for it. Greping timezone found the concerned lines, which issue the command:

    wget -O - -q http://geoip.ubuntu.com/lookup

    and parse the resulting xml.

    Rather than load up python or something else, I just wrote a quick bash script that grabs the xml and yanks the timezone out with sed:

    #!/bin/bash

# Fetch timezone from Ubuntu's geoip server
TZ=`wget -O - -q http://geoip.ubuntu.com/lookup | sed -n -e 's/.*<TimeZone>\(.*\)<\/TimeZone>.*/\1/p'`

# Set the current time
cp /usr/share/zoneinfo/$TZ /etc/localtime
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  3. I believe that it uses your internet connection & ip address to find that information. When I have installed offline it always asks you to select a timezone.

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