Weather/Clock Issue

[bwat47]

After I set my current location as "home" so I can get the weather in my gnome panel, every time I reboot it "forgets" and I have to set it as my home location again. Is there anyway around this?

[MaddogF16]

What country are you located in? Is the clock wrong everytime? Do you dual-boot with Windows?

[bwat47]

What country are you located in? Is the clock wrong everytime? Do you dual-boot with Windows?

I do dual boot, and am in the US. I did have an issue with utc time being enabled by default, but disabled that in a config file (UTC=no in /etc/default/rcS), and since then times in mint and windows are both correct. My issue right now is when you add a location in the time preferences, and click "set" it doesn't stick after a reboot. (and to show weather in the gnome panel yo need to have a location set as home)

[MaddogF16]

When I get home tonight I'll have a look see and see if there's a spot to add it manually.

[zerozero]

Also the clock is not retaining the location between sessions (even after "set" and entering password) -- which I am made to understand could be related. Unlike the desktop problem the clock problem is for both accounts.

This is a currently known problem with LMDE but the fix is rather easy. Open Synaptic, search for and install NTP (Network Time Protocol daemon). Once installed open Mint menu and in the search bar type in NTP. Once you've opened the NTP window set your locale settings and save (it's pretty obvious). Once this is done go to your tray and open your clock preferences and save your current time again (even if it's the correct time) and you're done. LMDE will retain the correct time through sessions and reboots.

Worked for me as well as others.

[bwat47]

Thanks

[papakaz]

Actually, that didn't work for me. I think that is solving a different problem -- a non-persistent time-zone problem.

My clock retains the time-zone just fine. It is the weather that I want to see, and cannot. It seems to me that it is the weather location that I need to reset, not the time location, if that makes sense.

This bug report here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/linuxmint/+bug/642946 seems to state the issue too, though no solution has been given on that page.

[MaddogF16]

I just use the weather applet that's available when I right click and choose add to panel.

[papakaz]

Ah, now we're getting somewhere... maybe. I tried this other weather applet just suggested above by MaddogF16 and upon trying to make it work I get

City: DEFAULT_LOCATION

instead of an actual location.... Could this be part of the same problem? Could the clock/weather applet be trying to read the same info as this other weather applet?

I'll google DEFAULT_LOCATION and see if I can't play with this... unless of course someone reading this knows the answer already...

***later***:
No luck with the googling so far. I did remove the applet and delete the gconf config folders, then added the applet again and set up again. No change.

Might this be related to my other persistency problem, whereby the desktop icons (computer, home, and mounted volumes) always show up, no matter how many times I turn them off?

I'll go google some more....

[MaddogF16]

Try creating a new user and see if it works under that account, that way we can see what level the issue may be coming from, either software or user configuration level.

[papakaz]

Did it. The weather location problem continues on all user accounts...

However, the desktop icons setting persistence problem seems only to happen with my account.


This is just an observation. I have one of the other accounts set up with admin privileges. When I was using Isadora, that user would enter her own password for admin stuff. With LMDE, it always asks for my own (root) password by name, no matter the account. The new account I created for testing purposes has no special privileges. When I "set" the location in the clock/weather applet in the new account, it asked for my own (root) password. This info may be completely superfluous, but I'm new to the LMDE scene....

[papakaz]

I'm still working on this issue -- but I've moved upcountry a bit and installing the new internet connection is proving to be a challenge.

[daze0f_theweak]

I am also having the same problem.

Every time I restart my laptop, my clock goes half an hour behind the real time. I can check "show weather" but nothing appears.
A small empty space does seem to be added to the left of the clock, but that is all. The weather report applet works fine, which is what I'm using for now.
The BIOS clock is correct and I am dual-booted with Windows 7 x64 and installed Katya x64 with Mint4Win.

I hope my input helps in some way.

[nykur]

I have exactly the same issue with LMDE. The Weather indicator does not show in panel unless I set the location. This I have to do every time I boot. Time is fine, although a little ahead of my actual time (Reykjavík). This is a little annoying, although hardly a showstopper. I do not have other OS's on this computer and only one user account apart from root.

[papakaz]

Back online again after getting internet upcountry (though technically "broadband" it's as slow as a late 90's dial-up).

To the weather issue. Daze0f_theweak's problem is not exactly the same as mine. I have no "empty space problem".

The only problem I have here [editing from earlier to make more clear] is that while the location itself persists, it's condition of being "set" for the purposes of being the "home location" does NOT persist from session to session. This is on all user accounts. Due to an unrelated problem, I ended up reinstalling LMDE (making sure the md5sum, etc, etc,). I used the same home partition (did not format), but was careful to delete any and all hidden files (configuration files) from my home folder before the new install.

Same problem.

Could this be a "Debian" vs "Mint" issue? (Similar to the "mint-fortune" problem?) After the install I immediately did "sudo apt-get update" and "sudo apt-get upgrade", instead of using the mint-update interface. When asked which config file to use, I always mark "keep" the old one. (This makes the fortunes in the terminal/console go away, until you fix line 35 of the config file.) So could the weather location problem be a similar issue?

[papakaz]

Still no progress on this here -- or at launchpad. Must be (obvious?) that only a few of us have this issue...

With LMDE, I have this minor issue and one other: The lack of a boot-splash. Otherwise, I'm very happy. LMDE is a major achievement in the OS world, and I'm lucky to be the beneficiary of all the hard work that went into it.

Having said that, I'm still a smidgen annoyed that it doesn't work seamlessly -- and that I don't have the knowledge to fix it myself....

[Neck]

Did a quick investigation on your clock issue, confirmed it happen for me too. Also I can give a bit more details: the problem is not that the value is not saved, it actually is in "/apps/panel/applets/clock/prefs/cities" (use gconfeditor to see it). The problem appears to be the clock-applet not reading this value properly, that's beyond my scope.

P.S. really relevant bug reports are there:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/gnome-panel/+bug/278059
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=565941

Sadly seems like they don't get much love.

[keivan]

This problem is still present in 2.30.2 version of the Clock program (gnome-applet).

[papakaz]

More information yet:

I discovered after I added a second location that the applet also "forgets" the second location as well.
This might be a clue -- for someone who knows where to look.
So to summarize, the behavior it seems is this:
The applet retains only one location, and does not retain that location's status as being "set" for purposes of showing the weather forecast.
To put it another way:
"Location 1" is always retained by the program from session to session, regardless of whether I "set" it.
However, "Location 1"'s status of being "set" (for the purposes of the weather forecast) is always lost.
"Location 2" never persists to the next session, regardless of whether "Location 1" is set or not.

Obviously this is only a small annoyance. And judging by the activity, I think only a very small minority of us have this annoyance (I didn't have it with Isadora).
Well.... maybe GNOME 3 will (---- heavens, did I really start to say that? )

[papakaz]

Solved it.

When we are trying to "set" the location for the weather, what we are really doing is attempting to change the system time zone -- because for whatever reason, upon installation of LMDE, the system time zone didn't get set to the same place that we want our weather report to be.

Here's my theory: The "mechanism" that tries to change the system time zone asks for a password -- the user password, I presume. But our user password is the same as the root password -- never mind that. The mechanism can't change the system time zone with what it thinks is a user password. At least that's what I guess is going on -- there could also be some other issue here.

Regardless, THE FIX for me was to change the system time zone using the "time administration tool" a.k.a. the "time and date settings" gui -- accessible in LMDE via the control center. Therefore the first part of the problem is solved.

It's a open question as to whether or not I can now change the weather "home" location via the clock applet. I'm not going to test this. But my guess would be "no", since that was the problem to begin with.

As for the second part of the problem, additional locations still do not persist from session to session. That's really too minor a thing for me to actively pursue. In case you can't tell, I'm just a regular desktop user with limited Linux knowledge -- and limited time to play with it.