[Solved] Questions about Arch on T420s

Question

Hello everybody,
I'm relatively new to Arch and switched from Ubuntu last year. Since then I've learned a lot about Linux in general due to the great documentation provided by the Arch community.
I've managed to install Arch on my Thinkpad T420s with an UEFI Setup using Archboot. But still there are open questions.
My first question is about the UEFI System partition and grub2. Should the UEFI partition be mounted to the filesystem? What about updating Grub2 (eg for setting boot parameters) when the UEFI System partition is not mounted to the filesystem. Up to now I've set boot parameters by manually mounting the UEFI partition and editing the Grub2's menu.lst equivalent. I think this is not optimal.
My second question is about some graphical artifacts in Gnome 3. The T420s uses Intel HD 3000 Graphics. Sometimes icons in nautilus disapear or get replaced by black planes when hovering over them with the mouse cursor. Similar black planes replacing icons can be observed sometimes in Evolution or Rhythmbox. Furthermore gnome-terminal becomes transparent sometimes when I'm scrolling or switching between powertop2 tabs. Anyone else observed similar issues on their T420s or on other models with an Intel HD 3000? I use several options for the i915 driver but none of them seem to be related to the graphical artifacts. Furthermore I've disabled dVT in the BIOS.
options i915 modeset=1
options i915 i915_enable_rc6=1
options i915 i915_enable_fbc=1
options i915 lvds_downclock=1
options i915 semaphores=1
My last question is about the USB ports on my T420s. I've 3 USB ports, one on the left side (USB2.0) and two (USB3.0 and another USB2.0) on the back side. When I plug in a HD on the left side everything works fine and the filesystem is automatically mounted. When I plug in the same HD on the ports of the back side the HD isn't even recognized. Interestingly when i boot with the HD plugged into the back side ports everything works fine. Can you point me any directions how to solve this problem?
Hopefully sombody using Arch on a T420s has already solved these issues and could share the solutions. Otherwise I would be grateful for any suggestions.
Sincerely yours,
Tobsen
Last edited by tobsen (2012-02-09 17:15:27)

Answer 1

Hi Tobsen, I have a T420 also. Perhaps my experiences will be some help?
Regarding the USB ports: I installed Arch on my T420 with the Kernal 3.0.3 snapshot and all the USB ports worked out of the box. That sounds like a problem with udev to me, though. Have you checked the wiki article on this?
Regarding the graphical artifacts: For me, when a popup window appears from hovering the mouse over an icon, the window is sometimes blank grey. It's totally inconsistent, and I can fix it by just hovering over it again, so I haven't really bothered to examine the source of the problem. Could this be related to your problem with the GPU? I figured it was a problem with the windows manager I'm using (Enlightenment e17), which is unstable.
Regarding UEFI: I don't use GRUB2, so this may not be good advice, but I personally feel like you should avoid auto-mounting partitions you don't always need. It slows down boot, and if the partition is mounted, user error could damage it. I say you should keep doing what you're doing.