[debian-non-standard] FSG3 debian installation

Tomasz Chmielewski mangoo at wpkg.org
Wed Aug 27 15:26:04 CEST 2008


Benoit Schneider schrieb:
> Thanks for your answer I think I will send it the warranty :s I don't 
> want to open it.
> I hope to see you when is back ;)

There is one more thing which could break: the battery keeping real time 
clock (RTC). I saw it happen several times on FSG.

FSG-3 has a isl1208 RTC chip. If it ever looses power, the clock doesn't 
start to tick again; it has to be set first.

By default, Debian starts hwclock command which reads hardware clock 
time and sets system time from it.

Unfortunately, the current implementation of hwclock found in Debian 
Etch has a serious flaw:
1) it tries to read from the RTC before it writes to it,
2) if it can't read from RTC, it will repeat the process 1000000 times 
(yes, one million times)

Because of 2), FSG may seem unbootable (after about 24 hours, it 
continues booting). So if the USB-stick blinks a bit when you power on 
the FSG, it means that perhaps your RTC is out of date.

The easiest "fix" would be to rename "hwclock" command, so that it is 
not started (i.e., mv /sbin/hwclock /sbin/hwclock.orig).

You can download a fixed version of hwclock as a .deb package here 
(synnet-hwclock):

http://www1.wpkg.org/fsg-3-debian/

This hwclock was compiled from the current git of util-linux-ng.


If the USB stick doesn't blink at all, than it's perhaps something else.



-- 
Tomasz Chmielewski
http://wpkg.org



More information about the debian-non-standard mailing list