This is a problem with the programming library and can affect any operating system, not just Linux.
The greatest danger with the Year 2038 Problem is its invisibility. The more-famous Year 2000 is a big, round number; it only takes a few seconds of thought, even for a computer-illiterate person, to imagine what might happen when 1999 turns into 2000. But January 19, 2038 is not nearly as obvious.
Time_t is a data type used by C and C++ programs to represent dates and times internally. (Windows programmers out there might also recognize it as the basis for the CTime and CTimeSpan classes in MFC.) It is actually just a whole number, that counts the number of seconds since January 1, 1970 at 12:00 AM Greenwich Mean Time. By the year 2038, the time_t representation for the current time will be over 2140000000. And that's the problem.
