Hi,

Juste received last week my Smarttop , All the packaging is really great.

- Connected through HDMI to a 720p TV
- Got the OEM-config welcome wizard which show that Data was 1970.
- Fill up everything and after reboot : Black screen.
- Switched to TTy1 : after login, "password has expired"
- Changed password, try to launch something with Sudo : "password has expired" and so ON ....

So yeah, I'm really disappointed , I guess that if I change manually the Date ( date --date=mm/dd/yy ) , that will work , but a normal user would directly send it back ....


is this problem appear with most of the efikaMX owners ? I've never had this problem with x86 Ubuntu even with a wrong BIOS Date.

It does happen, but it's rare for a PC BIOS to be able to ship with the date set to 1969 - which is technically impossible for Linux (it's before the UNIX epoch started), but perfectly fine for most embedded real time clock chips.

If you can download the Installer image and flash it to a cheap 2G SD card, connect your system to an ethernet network before running it and it will image your system correctly.

We are just having some issues detecting the time and correctly setting it to a reasonable date. A rather clever solution we engineered may simply have to be made more dumb (take the time hardcoded as sometime in March, instead of attempting to get the time from the internet).

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Matt Sealey

Hi Neko and thanks for your answer.

I'm not sure I understood why I have to reflash a new image :

- oem-config started while date was 1970. it then created the account with the password.

I then start it again with the date still being 1970, did not connected it to internet or change manually the date.

Why the password appear as expired? Because there is something hardcoded on linux accounts that shows them expired if they are older than something like 1991 ?

Did you specifically activate the password expiration on your images ?

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Ubuntu Computers from France on http://ekimia.fr

It is part of Linux, the pam authentication system is freaking out. Basically passwords are not set to expire, but comparing some date to the crazy time_t the system is set to, seems to return "account password expired" to the system, instead of letting it through...

I have no idea why and to be honest, your system should never be set to 1969/1970. I doubt the security and authentication developers spend a lot of time looking at fringe cases of when the RTC is set wrong.

We recommend reflashing it because it's ridiculously complicated to fix, otherwise. It may be causing some very strange problems up and down the software stack if any files in the system have been touched and changed to dates like 1969 or 1970.. in actual fact if oem-config did anything, these files are according to the time comparison code in Linux "created in the future".

It's strange, weird and wonderful error, but it can be fixed with an SD card, ethernet cable, and 10 minutes of watching a progress bar..

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Matt Sealey

Hi Matt and thanks for your answer. I really appreciate the great Linux support that genesi is giving.

I will flash a new image tonight, so you suggest that while oem-config is ran, it should be connected to the inet so the ntp client set the HwClock before the users and system is created ?

Too bad I can't get admin rights without sudoing, I could have then change the time manually and I guess it would have solved without reflashing.

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Ubuntu Computers from France on http://ekimia.fr

While imaging, connect it to a network.. that's the most reliable, otherwise times may not be preserved on the installed image.

Alternatively, don't connect it to a network at all, and it will take the system time from the SD card (it uses the file time of the archive used to image the system, which is sometime early morning March 3rd 2011). The date will be wrong, but not that wrong - by connecting to the internet during oem-config or logging in when finished, it will pull the correct time at that point.

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Matt Sealey

Hi all Efika Lovers !

Good news ! My probleme is resolved without having to Reflash it seems.

As usual the system asks me to change my password becasue it is expired as soon as I try to sudo anything. this time I connected to internet and then change the password and it worked !

Without forcing NTP, the clock updated and after the password changed I could restart Gdm with sudo and so far everything works weel , I wil keep in touch on this time issue.


Next Step : test some HTPC features now :-)


BTW : What is the best IRC/jabber to talk with other efikaMx users/developers ?

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Ubuntu Computers from France on http://ekimia.fr

hmm did you ignore or not understand the warning when matt said:
"We recommend reflashing it because it's ridiculously complicated to fix, otherwise.

It may be causing some very strange problems up and down the software stack if any files in the system have been touched and changed to dates like 1969 or 1970..

in actual fact if oem-config did anything, these files are according to the time comparison code in Linux "created in the future".

so i hope you are ready and watching for these "It may be causing some very strange problems up and down the software stack " rather than re-flashing as instructed.

although a direct link in the post to the files and instruction page might have been warranted here for other people with the same problem to follow and fix...OC

it appears given the date you said you would re-flash on the Mar 23 to reporting boot up and successful password setting today you were unsure about doing that and that's OK, it's better to ask exactly how to do it and learn something new after all.

does a step by step how-to page even exist for this problem i wonder, remember not everyone writes code and other low level tech stuff every day so might be unsure about several things they read here.

Hi popper, I understand your reaction.

But I don't know linux enough to understand why some files created in 1970 would give any problems, I don't say it won't , I'm just not sure why.

So to check I ran :


find / -type f -mtime +8000 -ls

and might just touch all those files to a date in our current century.

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Ubuntu Computers from France on http://ekimia.fr