I have an old G3 iBook that I use to perform backups (using rsnapshot). The scripts that run the backup process start it as soon as the machine wakes up, and put it back to sleep afterwards (using pbbuttonsd). Problem: every time I want to run a backup, I have to manually wake the machine up (by pressing the power button, or opening the lid). Clearly I'd like for the backup to happen ever if I forget, or if I'm not at home.
How it works on Mac OS X
If that iBook were running Mac OS X, it would be easy:
pmset repeat wake MTWRFSU 05:00:00
and it would wake up automatically, every day at 5 in the morning (those letters are ugly abbreviations for the English names of the days of the week).
But I have Linux running on that machine!
Can it be done in Linux?
It seems it can't: drivers/macintosh/via-pmu.c, the Power Management Unit's driver, implements only a couple of functions.
Is there a hope?
I tried to use a trick. I started with the Mac OS X 10.4 installation disk, opened a Terminal, and run pmset. Which did not work, giving me an error 0xe00002bc. Digging a bit on the Web we discover that such error means more or less "I can't write a file". Write a file? Whoever asked for such a thing?
Reading more attentively the documentation for pmset, we discover that it writes a couple of file in /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration. Obviously, having booted off a CD, that directory is read-only.
I can't find a way to create a tmpfs or similar, so I take a USB stick and try to mount it. It does not work: there are no drivers for FAT, or something. OK, I just format it HFS, and finally I mount it:
mount -o union -t hfs /dev/disk5s1 /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration
I re-run pmset, and finally the configuration is set.
Sadly it still does not work :-(
