For the brave, here is a beta copy of my latest project: A port of the NTP client chrony.

Chrony was designed to be used by systems with intermittent internet connections so it seems perfect for the 770.

To install:

1. Download the attached package and install it.
2. Edit the file /etc/chrony/chrony.defs and replace the servers.

This is the biggest problem with chrony - The NTP servers must be specified by IP address, not name. So, you'll have to look up a couple of servers from the public NTP List.

I'm not sure how easy the DNS problem is to fix, but worst case, I'll release an installer that prompts the user for ntp server names (and does the translation internally).

3. If you're paranoid, edit the /etc/chrony/chrony.keys file and replace the default password. The installer is supposed to generate a random key but I've disabled it for now (it's failing because the 'head' in busybox doesn't support the '-c' option).

So for now, you may want to edit the file and replace "password_here" with a password (only needed by the 'chronyc' command line utility).

4. Bounce the chronyd daemon (I usually just reboot).

Now, any time your 770 is connected to the internet it will attempt to sync with network NTP time servers. It will also detect when the network drops and not query the servers.

This package includes a daemon called "dbus_chronyd" that monitors DBUS messages and activates the chrony scripts accordingly (I was thinking of using sockets like the command line client but I was lazy).

This has worked fine for me, but it may cause your 770 to smoke (did anybody else read that post on the wiki???)

Please give it a try and let me know how it works.

Oh yeah, it requires root access and xterm. I'll fix that soon.

Thanks,

Brad.

EDIT: I rebuilt the package to remove the dependency on readline (until I can understand why the installer isn't working).

Also, as it's configured, chrony won't make drastic changes to your system clock, so you'll have to be patient.

My initial tests were to set the 770 15 minutes slow, and while timing it I realized that chrony only bumps the clock 1-3 seconds per minute, so an hour later is was still 5 minutes slow!

(this can be configured of course, but I think the default behaviour is what everyone really wants - otherwise you could miss alarms, drop events, etc.).