How to change the timezone in Ubuntu 22.04 | Linux Mint 21

Hello, friends. In this post, simple and for beginners, you will learn how to change the timezone in Ubuntu 22.04 | Linux Mint 21

The timezone is one of the issues that during the installation of an operating system is configured to improve the integration of the whole system. However, for any reason, we can change it to adjust it to a new location.

Think of it is that you move and need to change it manually or because you need to know it for configuration scripts. In any case, it is important to know this entire process.

Let’s start

Change the timezone on Ubuntu 22.04 | Linux Mint 21

The first thing we have to do is to verify which timezone is on the system. To achieve this, open a terminal and run the following command.

timedatectl

You will get an output screen like this

               Local time: Mon 2022-09-26 18:15:34 EDT  
           Universal time: Mon 2022-09-26 22:15:34 UTC  
                 RTC time: Mon 2022-09-26 22:15:34      
                Time zone: America/Montreal (EDT, -0400)
System clock synchronized: yes                          
              NTP service: active                       
          RTC in local TZ: no 

An essential thing to note is that the timezone is also written in the file /etc/timezone.

cat /etc/timezone

Output

America/Montreal

The next step is to change it, but first it is convenient to check all the available timezones.

To achieve this, just choose this command

timedatectl list-timezones

You will get a fairly large sample output with all available timezones.

Sample Output

.
.
.
Africa/Algiers
Africa/Asmara
Africa/Asmera
Africa/Bamako
Africa/Bangui
Africa/Banjul
Africa/Bissau
Africa/Blantyre
Africa/Brazzaville
Africa/Bujumbura
Africa/Cairo
.
.
.

It is a good idea to combine the above command with the use of grep to improve the data. For example

timedatectl list-timezones | grep "America"

There you will only show the timezones for America.

Finally, you can define the new timezone with the following syntax

timedatectl set-timezone [your-timezone]

For example,

timedatectl set-timezone America/Chicago

Finally, you can check the changes made

timedatectl

As you can see, it is a simple process, but it can help us in more than one occasion. On the other hand, it is also especially useful in advanced configuration scripts.