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.