Librem Mini Never Keeps Time

Hardware Librem Mini
1

My Librem mini simply does not keep time. If it goes into standby, or suspend, the clock stops going. I sign back in, and the clock is off by how long I was away from the machine.

I’ve tried all manner of ‘sudo timedatectl set-ntp yes’, as well as the UI in settings.

Does this little guy have some secret battery inside?

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What happens when you shut down the Librem Mini instead?

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Could be a bug … but if NTP is working, does the clock correct itself once it comes out of suspend and if given enough time?

(By way of example, a Raspberry Pi has no battery-backed up clock at all. So every time it boots, it says that the time is the time of the last shutdown, and once the network is up and it has been able to talk to an NTP server … which can take a minute or two … the time will suddenly jump forward to the correct time.)

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Yes, there’s an RTC battery on the bottom of the motherboard. It’s likely that it is disconnected or discharged.

If you’re comfortable disassembling the device to check or replace the battery:

  1. remove the top cover
  2. remove all M.2 cards/DIMMs - be mindful of the Wi-Fi antenna cables here and when removing the mainboard
  3. remove the four screws on the outer corners of the board (not those near the middle, those hold the heatsink)
  4. gently slide the mainboard toward the rear of the device, then lift out the front edge, then remove the mainboard

There’s also an excellent teardown video here, disassembly is around the 6 minute mark, RTC battery shown around 9:30: Librem Mini Teardown

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Thanks, I’ll give that a try – as soon as I dig out my smallest screwdriver set. :). The NTP doesn’t set the time after the unit being on network, even after an hour. So I’ll try the battery.

thanks!

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I had to upgrade to Fedora 40 completely to fix this issue. Then I said, what the hell, and moved from Fedora to PureOs. I don’t have that problem at all.

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