System Clock controll using Xfce on F17

[Areal Person]

The clock/date control is very poor on my F17 Xfce desktop and there is NO calendar
I cant set the clock without opening an Xterm and looking up the time then entering
a cryptc date/time command every day.

Is there any way to have a nice clock/calendar that works on it's own ??

Thanks,
-Areal

[george_toolan]

Try to replace your cmos battery ;-)

And your internet connection is broken too? Most people use NTP to set the correct date/time these days.

[stevea]

The package for network time is 'chrony'
sudo yum install chrony
sudo systemctl enable chronyd.service
sudo systemctl start chronyd.service


But there are at least 3 possible causes of your difficulty.

1/ Random time badness. You've got a bad CMOS clock or bad CMOS clock battery. Note that Linux read the CMOS clock once at boot, and then keeps it's own 'kernel clock' time using timers. UNLESS you or a tool like chrony resets it. Linux *may* set the CMOS clock on shutdown IF you have it configured.
2/ If the time starts out OK after boot then gets worse and worse - your system may have some HW/interrupt problems. It rare but some PCs have this problem.
3/ If your time is off by exactly N hours, then check if your CMOS clock is set to local time instead of UMT and it's Windoze messing w/ your clock. Windoze systems can only handle the HWclock set to localTime (terrible design decision), and they are too inflexible to use UMT then calculate local time. So if you dual-boot the system you need to set the CMOS clock to localtime and then configure your Linux accordingly. This is a workaround for Windoze stupidity.

---------- Post added at 08:02 AM ---------- Previous post was at 06:03 AM ----------

Try adding the 'orage' panel clock to a panel.

[secipolla]

The date-time plugin (available from the panel options) has a pop-up calendar too.

edit- and regarding chrony, the commands are

# systemctl enable chronyd.service
# systemctl enable chrony-wait.service

[Areal Person]

I'm using F17

NONE of these commands work !!

[secipolla]

su
yum install chrony
systemctl enable chronyd.service
systemctl enable chrony-wait.service

That will install chrony and enable it to run at boot time.
So it won't run right away. If you want to use it to synchronize the clock right after installing it, run

chronyd -d

then wait it synchronize the clock and end it with ^C (ctrl+c)

Maybe running

systemctl start chronyd.service

will do too.

[Areal Person]

Yes,

That worked !!!

Thanks so much

[stevea]

Originally Posted by Areal Person

I'm using F17

NONE of these commands work !!

Well you keep yelling "Help, Help" but you refuse to post any information about the problem.

If a command "doesn't work" you need to cut-n-paste the command and error response in your message.

Go re-read the 3 likely causes in post #3, and then tell us which one describes you problem.

Then read this before you reply.
http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=282819
You're wasting time & effort of others. Do your part.

[sidebrnz]

FYI, on modern Mobos, the CMOS is designed to make the clock run slow if the battery's weak, giving you a warning that it needs replacement. If the clock's gaining time, or the change is random, it's very unlikely that the battery is the issue.

[stevea]

Originally Posted by sidebrnz

FYI, on modern Mobos, the CMOS is designed to make the clock run slow if the battery's weak, giving you a warning that it needs replacement. If the clock's gaining time, or the change is random, it's very unlikely that the battery is the issue.

Not true. The CMOS clocks run off a crystal oscillator (similar to a watch) that either runs at the spec frequency or doesn't run at all. The gating of the counters is all deterministic. There is no "slow down" feature in the design.

When the voltage is low the oscillator may not operate or the CMOS gates will fail to clock and/or fail to keep it's settings. It can clock incorrectly on a gate-by-gate where this is more likely to impact the higher frequency but lower drive current gates (internal higher frequency counters). So in some cases a low voltage condition can result in missed clock counts, but this is not a design feature but an artifact of the CMOS design and is not a reliable symptom.

My experience is the dead-battery CMOS clock will most often lose the value of current time when powered off and resume from a 'garbage' or 'semi-random' time when power is reapplied. Of course when the system is powered up it operates normally, but from an unacceptable starting value.

So either random time values or random amounts of lost time, or time lost equal to time since last shutdown represent a possible CMOS clock battery failure.


OTOH if the OPs clock is always off by LOCALTIME-UMT hours - that's a different story. IF the OP sets the time, then as the system runs he loses time ... that's yet a different story. Without more info all suggestions represent a 'shotgun' approach and not a diagnostic cure to the problem.

[sidebrnz]

Interesting. I wonder why they removed a feature that's been standard for over twenty years that I know of.