[olpc-help] Setting the time

[Doug Jones]

Laurie DeMott wrote:
> My XO clock reads thirteen hours fast and I have tried following the wiki  
> to reset it but have been unsuccessful. The timezone is correct but when I  
> enter /usr/sbin/ntpdate time.nist.gov, Terminal tells me "no server  
> suitable for synchronization found".  I also tried ntpdate pool.ntp.org  
> (as described in another wiki) but was told "command not found".   I did  
> use the su command to get super user priviledges so that's not the  
> problem. My Linux abilities are limited to what I can copy from a wiki.   
> Any suggestions?
> 
> Laurie


su
/usr/sbin/ntpdate pool.ntp.org



...worked for me.  Using time.nist.gov instead worked too.

Obviously you have to have a working Internet connection at that moment, 
and the host you are trying to contact has to have one too.  :-)

On this laptop, you always have to put an explicit path like /usr/sbin/ 
or /sbin/ (as appropriate) in front of the command, because the shell 
doesn't have these directories listed in its search path.  Many other 
Linux distributions do have the search path set up so that you can skip 
that.

So any commands you find in documentation for other Linux distros might 
have to be modified a bit.  (And many commands that are commonplace on 
other distros aren't even present on this laptop  --  presumably to save 
storage space.  If you need those commands, you have to install them 
with 'yum install whatever'.)