I'm having this weird problem with timezones for events in the Calendar. I live in Eastern Standard Time, but work in Central Time, so that's what I use for all my events and appointments. In the settings in Calendar I set the timezone to America/Chicago. When I create a new event, the timezone is set to America/Chicago. But, when the event is created, it's displayed in the wrong slot in the Day view. For example, I create an event starting at 9:00 AM Central Time. In the day view, it appears at 10 am, as if the view is still in Eastern Time. Additionally, sometimes when I edit an event and press Apply, the timezone suddenly shifts back to America/New York. I was using Kontact 4.2.4 packaged for Kubuntu Jaunty; I upgraded to 4.3 from the kubuntu backports ppa to see if that would fix it, and while KDE 4.3 is beautiful, this weird error is still happening. Is it a bug? Is it because my system time is still in Eastern?

This sort of problem is usually concerned with setup, and can be hard to fix without changing existing appointments. Generally it is best to make sure that the bios time setting is in UTC, after which time zones are calculated by KDE using the offset. Can you check whether this cures it for you? Just make a note of anything you change, in case you have to change it back.

I checked the BIOS time, and it is set to UTC. My time zone in KDE is set to America/New York, and correctly showing UTC -4 hours. I'm still having this problem in Kontact Calendar, and it's driving me nuts. It feels like a bug in Kontact, because the way that events displayed in the Day view should be relative to the time zone chosen in the Calendar Settings and should not have anything to do with the system time or the KDE time.

Here are some pictures to illustrate the problem:

First, I have my KDE preferences set to America/New York. Then, I set the preferences for Kontact to be America/Chicago:



I create a new event, set it to start at 10:00 AM, America/Chicago time.



In the Calendar View, the event appears in the day at 11:00 AM, though the event says 10:00 am on it, which is even more confusing.



If I open the event again, it still says 10:00-12:00, America/Chicago.
But, if I change the time to 11:00-1:00. America/Chicago, when I hit "OK" the time zone for the event suddenly switches to America/New York. The times themselves are not changed.



Back in the Calendar view, the event is now listed from 11:00 to 1:00, but the time in the event is now wrong: 10:00 to 12:00.



Here's my interpretation:

1. the Calendar Day and Week view are displayed using the KDE timezone, NOT the timezone chosen in the Kontact Settings.

2. the time displayed within the event IS displayed using the timezone chosen in Kontact Settings, ignoring the timezone chosen for the specific event.

3. editing an event time incorrectly reverts the event's timezone to the KDE timezone.

Should I file a bug report? There's no way that can be the intended behavior.

I thought I had answered this on Tuesday evening, but here goes USA time zones make my head spin, but I'm guessing that Chicago is 1 hour behind New York - right?

Your KDE setting is for NY time, and you set an appointment for Chicago time, so the way it looks to the system is that you are in NY, but want to attend a meeting in Chicago. The text shows you the Chicago time of the appointment, but the graphic shows you what time it will be in NY. If, for instance, that was a tele-conference meeting that would be exactly the information you need. Does that make sense to you?

Hi Skullmunky

I have similar problem of Kontact Calendar time zone.
I have tried for solving this problem but I can't solve it.
If Anyone who know about it then please solve it because it is important for me.

Thanks in advance.

hi annew,

thanks for the reply. that's right, US eastern time (new york) is one hour ahead of central time (Chicago).

sure, the behavior makes sense - but not for my use case. kontact is assuming that I always want to view times relative to my current location (e.g. for teleconferencing). But these are all for physical meetings, and I need to see them relative the time zone in which I will be when the meeting occurs.

It's starting to sound to me like this is a use case the developers haven't foreseen, and there isn't a feature for it yet - so maybe I should request it? Specifically, a "Set Viewing Time Zone" feature which will display the daily calendar relative to a chosen time zone rather than the current system time zone.

The first thing then is to see whether other people would find this useful. Create a thread on brainstorm. It will be interesting to see how much support there is for this, and the developers are far more likely to implement it if you can demonstrate popular need for it.

@annew

I think you may have taken the wrong approach here. While it is easy to assume this timezone problem is a PEBKAC thing, there are at least three related bugs open

#115763
#159171
#170380

The problem seems to have carried through from at least 3.4 and is still there in 4.3.2

Personally, I think this bug is a major usability problem for ordinary users of KDE, e.g. me.

It also makes some of the time oriented bling of KDE4 a bit naff.

@skullmunky
@zekfrancis

If you were to look at bugs.kde.org #170380

http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=170380

you will see that although I am not a coder I'm trying to do some amateur sleuthing to try helping solve the problem

You might want to consider adding your examples to the bug report and, if you can, assist in helping identify the problem. (And if either of you is a coder, submit a patch)