Time and date

[joncrndl]

The computer booted up 6 hours into the future. (It is still Saturday here in Montana.) I went to System/Administration/Time and Date to adjust the time and program called, returned "unsupported platform". I have attached a screen shot of that window. :-)

I really like what I am seeing. It is especially since nothing in the Ubuntu 10.04 branch has been able to display once X11 is started. (that is another story).

I am using KNOS to make this post. It is working very well!

Attachments:

[Nancy McAleavey]

Windows sets BIOS for local time. Unix uses GMT. Since we don't want to disturb anyone's BIOS settings and mess up their Windows, we show the BIOS time. You can change it but it may screw up your primary OS in doing that.

[Kevin McAleavey]

Jun 12, 2010 20:53:36 GMT -5 joncrndl said:

The computer booted up 6 hours into the future. (It is still Saturday here in Montana.) I went to System/Administration/Time and Date to adjust the time and program called, returned "unsupported platform". I have attached a screen shot of that window. :-)

I really like what I am seeing. It is especially since nothing in the Ubuntu 10.04 branch has been able to display once X11 is started. (that is another story).

I am using KNOS to make this post. It is working very well!

Thanks! Glad you came out to play - I had faith that your winter storage supply of squirrels would come in handy. If you really want to set the time properly (though it'll throw the time off on other OS's in all likelihood) go up to the time/date on the top, right click and select "preferences." You can change it in there if you really want to. Since KNOS runs as an extremely limited user, that admin stuff *is* off limits by design. Hope this helps in addition to Nancy's explanation. Last thing we want to do is change the underlying system or put up an annoying "hey kids! What time is it?" prompt at startup ...

[moody]

[\quote] Last thing we want to do is change the underlying system or put up an annoying "hey kids! What time is it?" prompt at startup ...[/quote]

This OS being aimed at the corp. environment and all, you may want to rethink the user, or admin not being able to set it to their time zone. You know how users have nothing better to do than whine about about stuff like that. In a perfect work environment, for the IT guys anyway, this would be the only OS users would have access to, where setting the time in the BIOS would be the thing to do, but there's no such thing as a perfect work environment. Imho, most companies will never break the ties with M$.

[joncrndl]

Making the change by right clicking on time in the upper right had corner of the screen did work well.

This computer very RARELY has Windows running on it. It is usually a linux and now KNOS.

The option under System/Administration/Time and Date should either be removed or altered. Running Time and Date from that menu option gives the Unsupported Platform message.

[Kevin McAleavey]

Jun 12, 2010 22:06:08 GMT -5 moody said:

This OS being aimed at the corp. environment and all, you may want to rethink the user, or admin not being able to set it to their time zone. You know how users have nothing better to do than whine about about stuff like that. In a perfect work environment, for the IT guys anyway, this would be the only OS users would have access to, where setting the time in the BIOS would be the thing to do, but there's no such thing as a perfect work environment. Imho, most companies will never break the ties with M$.

Actually ... as Jon saw with his, if you *want* to set the time, you can and in an even friendlier method for travelling. You can right-click on the clock thingy and select your location by country/city and it will automatically set the time zone from that information. Jon is using a machine set up for Linux and there's a difference between how Windows and unix machines such as BSD, Linux or OSX handle the time settings. In Windows, the BIOS time is set to local time by the OS and Windows kernel "adjusts for GMT" within the IE code used by the system. Thus, for Windows, the BIOS time is *always* the local time for the machine. In other words, whatver you set the time and date for in Windows, the BIOS date and time is changed by Windows to whatever local time you set inside Windows itself.

Since KNOS is primarily intended for Windows users, at this time we thought it sanest to present the same time and date that Windows would so that there would be no desire to change it and cause the displayed time to be incorrect when people went and rebooted into Windows. It was a design decision I made for this build in order to minimize confusion. I had to choose between correct WINDOWS time or correct UNIX time and went with Windows as the design point for this one.

When we actually go to build a custom KNOS (or the customer buys the toolkit and makes their own) the objective will be selecting how that would be handled in the custom build. We can even got the route of a special applet to handle time zones and changes - in this particular situation though I made the decision to choose to just leave that alone so that the end user wouldn't have to figure out how to do it, or where.

But yes ... you're absolutely right there. I think it's just one option the end user should have for the KNOS they want to distribute as to how they go about it.

[Kevin McAleavey]

Jun 12, 2010 23:25:52 GMT -5 joncrndl said:

Making the change by right clicking on time in the upper right had corner of the screen did work well.

This computer very RARELY has Windows running on it. It is usually a linux and now KNOS.

The option under System/Administration/Time and Date should either be removed or altered. Running Time and Date from that menu option gives the Unsupported Platform message.

Yep ... agreed that I should have pulled that. I did pull a few other items from there that weren't appropriate for KNOS and somehow left that one in, not thinking that it would cause confusion. There's supposed to be a new build of that coming in the next kernel library with which we'll do our next build, and it did work right up until some kernelmod changes I did just prior to release.

I'll take this opportunity to explain the time/date settings though for the benefit of anyone interested once again. KNOS, as designed, will present the CORRECT time and date if KNOS is run on a machine that had Windows running on it. The incorrect time will only occur if the machine had its BIOS time set by any unix-based OS such as Linux, Solaris, BSD or OSX. And yes, if you have an Intel-based Macintosh, you can run KNOS on it just like on a Windows machine! But any machine where the BIOS time was not set under Windows will display an incorrect time in KNOS. We intentionally designed this version of KNOS to use the incorrect "local time" instead of "GMT time" because that's how Windows works and we didn't want to have regular Windows users seeing the wrong time in KNOS. So you "l33t" type individuals (heh) can suffer instead! (grin)

[joncrndl]

That works for me. I do understand that I don't fall into your primary demographic.

[Kevin McAleavey]

joncrndl

Just noticed something in your diagnostics about your wifi connection problem ...

Jun 13 03:13:11 KNOS-32bit kernel: iwn0: radio is disabled by hardware switch

Could it be?

[joncrndl]

The first diag from the T61 was when the wifi switch was off when KNOS booted up. I turned the wifi switch on to see if KNOS would figure that out. I also pulled the network wire out. It did not seem to work out well. I rebooted with the wifi switch on and it did work well. It worked out very well today when I was at a coffee shop using the unsecured public wifi there.

[Kevin McAleavey]

Jun 13, 2010 23:29:56 GMT -5 joncrndl said:

The first diag from the T61 was when the wifi switch was off when KNOS booted up. I turned the wifi switch on to see if KNOS would figure that out. I also pulled the network wire out. It did not seem to work out well. I rebooted with the wifi switch on and it did work well. It worked out very well today when I was at a coffee shop using the unsecured public wifi there.

That'd explain it.

KNOS is pretty neat stuff though, eh? Been using it myself for three years now and made me forget all about Redmond. Vista and the price tag for Vista 7 also helped. And you were there many many years ago back before my government agency got eaten up by yours, laughing in your face over the Solaris you guys bowed to, saying "Linux is the teats" back when it actually worked. Heh. Linux is cool and all for us glittergeeks, but I like this a *whole* lot better.

[Kevin McAleavey]

Jun 13, 2010 9:30:24 GMT -5 joncrndl said:

That works for me. I do understand that I don't fall into your primary demographic.

Sorry for missing the comment, things have been a bit crazy on this end the past few days. One of the nice things about KNOS is that there ISN'T a "primary demographic." Unlike all those Linux distributions, live cd's and such, KNOS is intended to be highly customized by use of our toolkit. The only "primary demographic" KNOS is geared towards is that demographic that someone's willing to pay us to serve with a highly specific custom version of KNOS with only those things that they want their users to have, and none of those things that they DON'T want their users to have. If you can afford it, we can build a KNOS just for you, and nobody else. Heh.

In a situation where an ISP wants to distribute a modern version of those old AOL disks, KNOS can be highly specific to their system requirements and very general like this version is to support pretty much anything and everything. For IT departments that buy a handful of very specific models of machines, KNOS can be built to be completely compatible with specific hardware, eliminating a LOT of bloat if it only has to work with specific devices in a specific way. And of course, a customized KNOS can be delivered to work on exotic machines such as PC98, DEC Alpha, PowerPC, Sparc64 as well as cellphones using the ARM chipsets. The whole purpose of the KNOS project is to depart from the "standard distributions" as known in the Linux world and deliver highly specialized, customized builds of KNOS to whatever a customer desires to deliver.

That is what sets us apart from all the rest, and why there's no such thing as a "primary demographic." We've entered the age of highly customized solutions that can replace tired old computing technologies, with safety, security, privacy and reliability. THAT is the purpose of the KNOS Project. One of these days when things are a bit quieter here and we have a few extra hands to handle the minutae, I'll write an entire tome on the "vision" and why what we're doing is so unique.