date and X settings not saving?

[Bill Fink]

On Tue Apr 23 2002, Jay Savage wrote:

> The install seemed to go fine, and I noticed rather dramatic improvement
> (because the same physical drive is no longer handling both swapping and
> the read-writes to  the shared files in /usr?).  /but/  I now lose both
> the time and my X configuration everytime I reboot.  Setting the date isn't
> too bad, but running Xconfigurator all the time is a pain.  I initially
> thought--since it involved the system clock--that it might be the battery,
> but the system clock works fine on the Mac side.

Hi Jay,

First, you should set your e-mail program to wrap lines at say 72 columns
(the above was initially one huge long line).

Now on to your 2 questions, which are probably FAQs by now.

    1.  If you use separate / and /usr partitions (which I no longer
        recommend), you will run into problems with the clock setting
	since at the time hwclock is run in /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit, the
	/usr partition is not yet mounted, and since /etc/localtime
	is just a symbolic link to /usr/share/zoneinfo/..., it will
	not work properly.  My fix for this was to simply:

	mv /etc/localtime /etc/localtime.orig
	cp /etc/localtime.orig /etc/localtime

	This makes /etc/localtime into a normal file which can be
	directly accessed in the root partition.  Note that there
	are other similar potential problems in the rc.sysinit file
	when you use separate / and /usr partitions, such as the
	setting of the keyboard mapping, but in my case this didn't
	bite me since the resultant behavior was to wind up using
	the default keymap which was fine for me.

    2.  To prevent the system from messing with your X configuration,
        you need to do two things:

	a.  Insure Xautoconfig is disabled by:
	
	    chkconfig --level 0123456 Xautoconfig off

	b.  Comment out the following lines in the /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit
	    file:

	    #if [ -x /usr/X11R6/bin/Xautoconfig4 ]; then
	    #  OFFB=`cat /proc/fb |grep -i 'offb'`
	    #  if [ ! -z "$OFFB" ]; then
	    #    action "Configuring X11: " /usr/X11R6/bin/Xautoconfig4
	    #  fi
	    #fi

I think that should do it.

						-Hope this helps

						-Bill