Saturday, May 1, 2010

More on changing the Gnome clock

In my previous post about the Gnome clock, I showed you how to change the clock from the default 24 hour time display to a 12 hour format. In this post, I will show how you can change things to display seconds as well. Here is my default display string in gconf-editor:

%a %b %d, %l:%M %p

From reading the date manpage, you know that this will display the Year, month, day, hours and minutes. Something like this: Sat May 01, 5:16. But what about seconds? If you want that, just add the appropriate specifier (%S) to the date string:

%a %b %d, %l:%M:%S %p

Note: You will also need to check the 'show_seconds' box roughly 11 places below the date string setting in gconf-editor. If you forget this part, the seconds portion will display, but the numbers will not actually change until the minutes portion changes because the clock isn't being updated every second.