amiga-news.de - AmigaOne X5000: Why AmigaOS 4 and MorphOS tick differently

25.Feb.2023

AmigaOne X5000: Why AmigaOS 4 and MorphOS tick differently
What is one of the advantages of an AmigaOne X5000? You can use AmigaOS 4 and MorphOS in parallel on it (and Linux). But what drives you crazy on a regular basis? The obviously out-of-sync clocks!

Naturally, at first one doubts one's own inability to use the two OS correctly. But if you ask around, even experienced developers feel the same way: If you set the clock correctly under AmigaOS 4 at the moment, at winter/standard time, it will show one hour later when you boot MorphOS afterwards. Conversely, after setting the correct time under MorphOS, the hour hand goes forward one hour. How?

The solution to the riddle was not only profoundly but also very helpfully led by the MorphOS developer Frank Mariak and the AmigaOS developer Olaf Barthel: As Mariak explains, "MorphOS sets the time in the RTC hardware clock to Universal Coordinated Time (UTC) - just like Linux and also MacOS. Everything that is then set in the operating system in terms of times is the local time, which is derived from UTC".

AmigaOS works differently, which is due to its history, to which Olaf Barthels explains: "In 1985/1986 one could not yet look far enough into the future. The operating system interfaces for reading and setting the current system time were not designed to take time zones into account back then. So when you call up what time it is and what date is current, you always get back the "local time". When setting, it is the same (the local time is expected).

With AmigaOS4, it is assumed that the time information for files, etc. always represents the local time. The local time is then automatically changed if necessary. This time change issue has even been present in AmigaOS for a very long time (late 1980's/early 1990's)."

And Frank Mariak adds: "The problem also existed for a long time with MorphOS because of the legacy compatibility to AmigaOS, until with MorphOS 3.10 a usable, compatible way was found to store the time in UTC in the hardware, but still realise the possibility of the automatic summer/winter time change under MorphOS".

Conclusion: either you continue to set the clock manually in the future, or you use a possibility to automate this via Network Time Protocol (NTP) server. A simple but elegant option for this is the commodity Mr. Wolf: placed in the appropriate folder under Utilities and permanently integrated via WBStartup, the time is adjusted automatically when an internet connection is available. However, two things need to be taken into account:

Obviously, the network connection on the X5000 is activated a little later than the WBStartup programmes are started. Therefore, it is important to set a "DELAY", i.e. a delay of a few seconds. By the way, during testing it turned out that after the elapsed ten seconds the time was still not adjusted. When asked about this, the developer Chris Young checked this and found that in the previous version 2.1 - regardless of the delay set - at least 15 minutes had to elapse. However, this has been fixed in version 2.2, which he has just released, and the delay entered does indeed take effect in this way.

Secondly, it is important that the time is not stored in the hardware. Otherwise you will have the problem of the shifted time again. Therefore, only set "SAVE=SYSTEM". (dr)

[News message: 25. Feb. 2023, 05:33] [Comments: 0]
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