Impossible to set date in 11.3.0?

[James Cameron]

On Sat, Aug 25, 2012 at 01:07:35PM -0400, Samuel Greenfeld wrote:
> To the best of my knowledge this is an intentional omission for
> antitheft reasons.  Instructions on how to set the clock from OFW or
> the command line are at http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Fix_Clock .

I think the task of setting the clock should be split from the
problems that lead to it described in that page.  It is far too scary
looking.

> If using the "date" command is not sufficient to permanently store
> the change, "hwclock --systohc" or similar may also need to be used.

"date" followed by a successful normal shutdown should work, because a
normal shutdown runs hwclock ... but "hwclock --systohc" is handy in
case you aren't sure that a normal shutdown will happen next.

> In newer firmware builds (potentially newer than 11.3.0's), Open
> Firmware can log into a Open, WEP, or WPA-PSK secured access point
> and use NTP to set the time.  To do this use the "essid" command
> followed by the actual ESSID to set the ESSID, "wep" or "wpa" to set
> the password, and "ntp-set-clock" (without any parameters) to query
> a server from the public NTP pool and get the current time.

The firmware included with 11.3.0 can already do ntp-set-clock with
open wireless access points and USB Ethernet adapters.  More recent
firmware fixed WEP and WPA-PSK, if I recall correctly.

(Nothing to do with WEP and WPA-PSK in Linux though, you can stay on
older firmware for that.)

-- 
James Cameron
http://quozl.linux.org.au/