I will be traveling to Jamaica in a few days to attend a conference. Plane tickets, visas, hotels are booked and bags are almost packed so I turn to my computer to go through the agenda of the conference and of course to update my iCal calendar with it.

First things first: you know how tricky the time zones can be with all that Daylight Savings Time so I decide to set up my calendars using local time to make sure I get things right. It’s quite easy, just hit System Preferences, Date & Time, Time Zone and select your local time zone.

But guess what! Some time zones (like Jamaica’s) are not accessible in this preference pane. I tried in vane to suggest that might make a valid time zone; neither Jamaica nor Kingston fit with the system’s choices.

After about 30 minutes of researching on the Internet I reached the following conclusions:

  • Jamaica’s Time Zone is: UTC-5 (same as GMT-5)
  • There is no DST in Jamaica
  • the name of the unix time zone is: America/Jamaica
  • Jamaica is not in US/Central time zone since it employes DST

But how to make Mac OS X use the time zone?

Fortunately there is an application that gives you access to a lot of features of Mac OS X using the command line: systemsetup, including setting the Time Zone; for Jamaica type the following in Terminal:

systemsetup -settimezone America/Jamaica

If you would like to choose another time zone, and you do not know the name, list all available time zones with the same application:

systemsetup -listtimezones | sort