I have a 4yr old Athlon-XP machine which I use as a Media Center/Home Theater PC. It is running RedHat 8.0 (heavily modified) with a Hauppauge PVR-250, MPlayer and some simple/buggy front end. Seeing as I designed it at the end of 2003, quite a bit of software is out of date. The most critical componets are the ivtv driver that runs the PVR-250 and MPlayer. I won’t update the ivtv because I built it for a 2.

In the past I’ve never actually changed my time settings on my computer, usually when booting into Linux the NTP (Network Time Protocol) server does the trick. However the local operating system (whether Linux or Windows) usually retains timezone settings in some way. I do not know if the RedHat/Fedora method is consistent with other Linux distributions. My personal desktop is running Fedora, Ubuntu, Windows 2000 and XP - all rather modern software with updates, so I wasn’t the least bit worried.