As said in my last post, I thought it was really cool that the UNIX clock will roll over to “1234567890″ on my birthday. I want to take a screenshot of it, so today I tried to figure out how to add the option back to GNOME’s panel clock applet. Note that this is biased toward Ubuntu but I’d imagine that GNOME is mostly similar across OSes that use it.
The option to switch to UNIX and Internet time was there in Feisty, and I’m presuming Gutsy and Hardy, but I just noticed today that it seems to be gone in Intrepid. I’m not sure if this is due to an update of GNOME or not. It was really frustrating me for a while, but I think I got it. It was murder trying to find it online, so here you go (ain’t I nice 
)
- Open a terminal, type:
gconf-editor
No, you don’t need to “sudo” this. Actually I tried it and I couldn’t get it to work that way.
- Drill down the path to
/apps/panel/applets/
- Look for a folder called “clock_screen0″, or, if you don’t have that (like if you’ve deleted the original clock and added another one back – as I did accidentally), look through all the folders called “applet_0″, “applet_1″, etc., until you find one with a “bonobo_iid” field containing “GNOME_ClockApplet”.
- Go down another directory into its “prefs” subfolder and change the “format” field from whatever it is to “unix”. This field can also be changed to “12-hour”, “24-hour”, and “internet” (Capitalization is unimportant but you do need the dashes)
You can also check the options for “unix_time” and “internet_time”, but it says they’ve been deprecated so they don’t have any effect that I’ve seen. I was hoping it would add the options back to the “Clock Preferences” dialog, but that wasn’t the case.
I found the path for this here: https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/desktop-bugs/2007-March/082400.html
From your text, I can’t figure out if you really got it to show or not. I couldn’t.
Anyway, if you can’t get it to work, screenshot this:
http://www.1234567890countdown.co.uk/
(Link found on wikipedia under the unix time article)
It should be a very accurate countdown timer, which uses AJAX to sync. with time server.
I know that’s what I’m gonna use.
And happy birthday tomorrow =)
Ooh thank you
I’ll try to rewrite it in case people still want to get that type of clock back.
It did show up, maybe my computer is just weird :/ What was the problem you had? I’m a really crappy explainer, so I might’ve missed something.
Thank you thank you!!!!!
I have really missed having the Unix time there, it comes in handy more often than people might think.
You’re very welcome. I’m glad this helped someone.
Actually, you commenting reminded me that I need to update this (the directions’ll be the same but it doesn’t read very well). So thank you
I missed the unix timestamp clock so much! THANK YOU VERY MUCH!!!!
You’re very welcome