Actually, on consideration, I don't think that automatic detection of the timezone is a viable solution. It suffers from all kinds of potential problems like "What does it do if it's connected to a VPN?". If I connect via VPN to my office in the UK when I'm in France, I'd get the incorrect time.
Or, if I'm in the airport and I'm not yet connected to a network in my new location, it will be silently giving me incorrect timezone information. It'll be telling me what time it is in the other country. That's acceptable if you know you have to set it manually, but people will depend on an automatic system, and miss their connecting flights. The trouble this will cause is a classic computer problem: it will be a system that is smart enough to be right most of the time. Being mostly right, people trust it and depend on it, and then get surprised in those cases where it is wrong. Besides, there is a laptop-detect package in Ubuntu: > $ aptitude show laptop-detect > Package: laptop-detect > State: installed > Automatically installed: no > Version: 0.13.7ubuntu2 > Priority: optional > Section: utils > Maintainer: Ubuntu Core Developers <ubuntu-devel-disc...@lists.ubuntu.com> > Uncompressed Size: 57.3k > Depends: dmidecode (> 2.8-2) > Description: attempt to detect a laptop > laptop-detect attempts to determine whether it is being run on a > laptop or a > desktop and appraises its caller of this. > So, it is certainly technically possible to tell if you're on a laptop. Therefore gnome can make decisions based on that fact. On 01/01/11 15:48, gpk wrote: > OK. I agree it would not make sense as the desktop default. > > On 01/01/11 14:53, Milan Bouchet-Valat wrote: >> We can't change PolicyKit permissions depending on whether the system is >> a laptop or not. So we'd have to make the change for all systems, which >> is not necessarily what people expect. And even laptops can be used e.g. >> in kiosks or schools, where you don't want people to play with system >> settings. >> >> I think the whole point will become obsolete anyway when GNOME 3 >> introduces automatic detection of location based on network. See >> http://live.gnome.org/Design/SystemSettings/DateAndTime for a rough >> mockup, which is partly implemented upstream. >> -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/696115 Title: Timezone should not require superuser on laptop -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
