PyDate

PyDate is a very simple tool to adjust the system date and time conveniently from an easy to use graphical interface.
It is primarily intended to be used with minimal desktop environments like IceWm which don't provide such tools themselves.
KDE or Gnome libraries are not required to run PyDate.

Dependencies

PyDate requires the following packages to be installed:

• Python and Tkinter (tested with version 2.6.6 , probably any Python-2 version > 2.5 should be fine, however pydate will not work with the new Python-3 series!)
• Tcl / Tk (tested with version 8.5.8 , anything >= 8.5 should be fine)
• iwidgets, tested with v. 4.0.1
• the "date" utility from the coreutils package (which should be installed anyway)

All of these should be included in any decent linux distribution, (though some might be split into several packages).

Installation:

Generally there is no installation necessary, just unpack the tar.bz2 archive and execute the pydate.py file. If you want to do a system-wide install, do (as root):

    # cd source_directory/pydate-1.0 && ./install.sh

This will install the files to /usr/local . After this you can start the program with the command "pydate".

Configuration:

There really is not much to configure. A few (hopefully self-explanatory) options to customize the appearance of the calendar widget and the Info/Help dialog can be edited directly within pydate.py:

• FIRSTDAYOFWEEK = 'monday'
  may be one of either 'sunday', 'monday', 'tuesday', 'wednesday', 'thursday', 'friday', 'saturday'
• WEEKDAYCOLOR = 'white'
  WEEKENDCOLOR = 'mistyrose'
  backgroundcolors for "Mon-Fri" and "Sat-Sun" respectively, may be any named color accepted by Tk (see here for a comprehensive overview) or a hexadecimal color string of the form '#rrggbb', as for example '#ffffff'
• INFOHEIGHT = 0
  INFOWIDTH = 0
  width and height of the "Info/Help" dialog window in pixels (0 = "auto"); due to bugs in the iwidgets html viewer it may happen that if the window's width is too small the layout of the tables appears oddly broken; in this case you may try to increase the window's width

Usage:

The program may be launched by any user, however in order to actually set the system date and time of course root privilege is required.

The date can be adjusted through the calendar widget, either using the mouse or through keyboard navigation.
When the calendar has keyboard focus, the following key bindings apply to the widget:

• Arrow-left   /     D     /   +   :   select the next day

• Arrow-right  /  Shift+D  /   -   :      "       previous day

• Arrow-up     /     M             :      "       next month

• Arrow-down   /  Shift+M          :      "       previous month

• Page-up      /     Y             :      "       next year

• Page-down    /  Shift+Y          :      "       previous year

The time of day may either be adjusted with the mouse by moving the clock's hands and selecting either "AM" or "PM".
Alternatively you can set the time in the time entry field:

• Arrow-left / arrow-right / BackSpace  :  select the active field (hours,
                                                      minutes, seconds, am/pm)

• Arrow-up / arrow-down / + / -         :  increase / decrease the value
                                                      in the currently selected field

• 0 - 9                                 :  set the value in the currently
                                                      selected field

• A / P                                 :  select am / pm

Global key bindings:

• Ctrl+S                    :  apply the selected date and time to
                                  the system clock

• Ctrl+Q                    :  quit the program

• F5                        :  update the calendar and clock widgets
                                  to display the current system time

• F1                        :  show info / help dialog window

Limitations:

PyDate allows to set the system time and date but not to change the timezone.
Handling timezones is rather complicated, because there is a considerable amount of platform specific issues to be taken into account. This is why I decided, for the sake of reliability, to not even try.

Bugs

There is an awkward design bug in the iwidgets Calendar widget: by default every month -even February- has 31 days ;)
I added some tricky code to remove these excess days, however in some cases (as for example Feb. 2014) the calendar layout shows empty space then where a line of days (representing a week) was before the useless days were removed, which makes the calendar look somewhat "vertically compressed" in these cases.
This is purely a cosmetic issue though.

The iwidgets html viewer appears to be buggy, so on some systems the layout of the info dialog might look more or less messed up.

News

Feb. 23 2013: PyDate-1.0

Initial reease.

Mar. 02 2013: PyDate-1.1

This release fixes a bug in the handling of keyboard events in the timefield entry that stopped keyboard navigation from working on some systems (as it was reported on debian wheezy).

Download

PyDate is available for download on its sourceforge site

License

PyDate is licensed under the terms of the Gnu General Public License.

Contact

Any comments, bug reports and suggestions are highly welcome.
Please mailto:
Michael Lange <klappnase (at) users (dot) sourceforge (dot) net>

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