Show UTC as a location in Gnome International Clock

I love the new international clock applet in Gnome.  It makes it easy to see a list of alternate time zones for coordinating with colleagues.  However, it seems to be missing the ability to add UTC as a timezone.  UTC, GMT, and Zulu are missing from the zone list, even though they’re present in /usr/share/zoneinfo.  Attempting to add a zone manually just results in a silent failure for some reason.

I’m sure there is a less insane way to do this, but hacking the gconf entries works.  First, figure out which applet number represents your clock.  To find out, I searched gconf for one of my configured locations:

% grep -lr Hillsboro .gconf
.gconf/apps/panel/applets/applet_7/prefs/%gconf.xml

This tells me that my clock is applet_7.  Next, fire up gconf-editor and navigate to apps/panel/applets/applet_7/prefs.  Edit the cities key and add a value of the following:

<location name=”Zulu” timezone=”UTC” code=”UTC” current=”false”/>

Save, quit gconf-editor, and pop open your location list to verify.

Category(s): Linux

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