[Sugar-devel] setting date and time (was: re: journal sort options)

[Tom Parker]

On Thu, 2010-08-19 at 11:23 +1000, James Cameron wrote:

> 1.  one tool is rdate, which is on the OLPC builds, but that requires a
> server nearby that runs the time service on port 37.  The command is
> "rdate -s SERVER", where SERVER is the IP address or host name of the
> server.

I tried rdate to the school server, but it wasn't listening. Our
deployment was not connected to the internet so I didn't try to work out
how the rdate server works and whether it was installed but not enabled.
I was going to make it part of my backup or samoan customisation script,
as I saw laptops with wildly varying times, but it didn't work and
adding a "connect to school server network" to our workflow was
undesirable anyway.

> 3.  yet another tool is the Linux date command,  but the format of
> the input is archaic.  I do not recommend it.

Not only is it archaic, it is undocumented :(

> On XO hardware, with security disabled, you can set the time using
> OpenFirmware:

It would be nice if the help screen on the open firmware actually
documented all the commands available, rather than just some of them. We
didn't manage to work out how to mirror the olpc or sugarlabs wiki onto
the school server and found a number of problems that could have been
more easily or more better solved if we had access to these resources.