Problems with the Thinkpad X220 and GPT, UEFI, MBR and Legacy BIOS Booting

After several days banging my head against a brick wall and suffering the indifference of Lenovo/IBM tech support I have learnt a lot about UEFI, in regards to the X220 in particular.

1. The X220 cannot/will not boot GPT disks using Legacy BIOS. I would call this a bug.
2. The X220 will not boot /efi/*/*.efi unless "signed"(?) into BIOS, you have to copy it to /efi/boot/bootx64.efi. I guess this is a security feature, but I'm not sure how secure it is if you can bypass it so easily.
3. Disabling the BIOS setting "USB UEFI BIOS Support" disables *all* USB booting, ie, both UEFI and legacy BIOS. If this isn't a bug then
   1. it at least needs relabelling,
   2. could be moved/linked to the boot menu and
   3. is redundant as you can disable USB booting using the Boot menu.

I should say that this was with BIOS version 1.22 (I think).

I recommend following these instructions to create a very useful and versatile boot disk for diagnosis.

If you want to use the X220 UEFI boot menu I recommend disabling booting from LAN as it adds a few seconds to the boot time. You have to disable it in several places in the BIOS to avoid the wait.

See also my more general post on Arch Linux on the X220.

Invalid MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1 key

I eventually tracked down the above error to the file ~/.Xauthority, which I removed, which solved the problem. Perhaps back it up first.

Google Chrome Browser Issues

I've used Chrome a few times since it was released, and it's very fast, but for me, it's just not quite there yet, there are these tiny little niggles:

1. Search as you type. I know I can press ctrl+f, and I know it occasionally mucks up keyboard shortcuts, but I don't care, I want it. Apart from that it makes browsing with the keyboard much easier as you can just hit enter on links, instead of having to hit escape and then enter.
2. Fonts in Linux aren't quite right, see the flickr menu for example, it goes onto two lines.
3. Little website specific bugs, for example, in flickr's organiser, if you press enter after adding a tag to a group of images it seems to hit the cancel button rather than the "thanks" button.
4. I'm getting used to using the history page rather than the missing recently closed tabs feature, but the jury's still out on that one. Ah, there is a recenetly closed list on the new tab page.
5. Would really like to be able to increase the number of thumbnails on the new tab page.
6. While using the debugger, alt+left/right should still navigate back and forward.
7. On Linux it has that same annoying issue that firefox has/used to have: if you kill X chrome thinks that it's crashed and wants you to confirm re-opening your tabs.
8. The spell checker is not as intelligent as firefox's, for example, "exersie" returns no suggestions.
9. The icon is too similar to Visual Studio's, I get confused :)
10. It does not check for a site before googling for what you type into the address bar, eg, if you type "intranet" into the address bar you get google results for "intranet", not your local intranet.
11. The speed boost just doesn't seem as pronounced on Linux.
12. RSS feeds don't seem to show up like they do in Firefox.
13. Chrome seems to "steal" Firefox's saved usernames/passwords and history, which I'm not sure I'm happy about.

I also have an issue with Buzz whereby a Buzz that is in both your inbox and buzz-box doesn't get marked as read in one when you read it in the other. I think that it's just delayed, but it does mean that I click on both boxes to see one message. Also, maybe if you're viewing your buzz-box and a new one comes in it should be marked as read straight away.

AND a couple for gmail: gmail search doesn't split words with underscores and the contact autocomplete doesn't search for words after a period.

Blogger Bugs

I've been wishing I could report bugs to/about blogger.com. Maybe if I post on it someone might hear me.

1) Search

Search on blogger is worse than news.bbc.co.uk. Kind of ironic as google owns (and runs?) it.
i) It does not do partial matches, for example, my post entitled Mixing It Up does not get returned on a search for mix.
ii) Text searches do not match on labels, for example, the post mentioned above is labeled cycling but a search for cycling does not return that post.
iii) Text within the post not matched, eg, the above post contains the word "mixer" in the text, but is still not returned on a search for mixer.
iv) No search on Neil's Meandering Mind blog returns any results. At the moment the fist story is entitled Twitter Vs Facebook, a search for Twitter returns no results. Google hasn't indexed Neil's blog, maybe that's why..?

UPDATE: They seem to have fixed iii). Or at least that particular example works now.

UPDATE:

v) While editing your blog, if you click Edit Posts, and then do a free text search, the label links on the left do not work. You have to empty the search box and click search and then the label links will work again.

2) Formatting

Formating seems to get lost if I use the Pencil logoed "Edit Post" link on a post rather than going blogger.com -> Edit Posts -> Edit post

UPDATE: I think this is because blogger.com takes me to draft.blogger.com while the post link takes me to www.blogger.com.

3) No WWW

For a while blogger.com did not work for me, I had to use www. This seems to have been fixed now. (See no-www and extra www.)

UPDATE:

4) Comment spam detection does not work.

I don't get many comments on my blog, but roughly half of the comments that I do get are spam. As far as I can see no comment has ever automatically been marked as spam. As with search, google does spam detection so well for gmail, why can't they do it for blogger?