As some of you might aware, the time kept by computers (or other timepieces such as clocks) are not accurate as there are various factor that causes time drift. Quartz inaccuracy, temperature, quality of the equipment, power from battery, mechanical wear and tear and so on.

These minor drift while might not seems to be significant, it will give you inaccurate measure of time. This might affect your other productivity work as the time kept by your computer is not accurate to the last second. Plus, certain application such as Stellarium and GPredict depends heavily on the time kept on your computer to give accurate result.

How to get accurate time in Ubuntu
You can ensure your computer gets the most accurate time by synchronizing it with an NTP server .

To do this you need to right click the Tray Clock in Ubuntu, and selects “Adjust Date & Time”.

A dialog will appear, press “Unlock” and enter your Administrator password to enable the menus.

Answer “yes” to install NTP packages. If your computer is connected to the internet it will be automatically synchronized with an NTP server.

Bonus :You can select the nearest NTP server to your place for faster synchronization, as shown on the picture. The nearest NTP server to Malaysia is maintained by SIRIM – mst.sirim.my.

Synchronize Time using command-line
Alternatively you can synchronize time by using ntpdate command-line tool, which is covered previously in this blog.

Tags: accuracy, clock, debian, linux, ntp, time, time server, ubuntu, watches

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