I have an acer timeline 1810tz and tried both openSUSE 11.2 and Ubuntu 10.04. The only way however to run linux on this notebook is to change in the BIOS the ACPI to IDE mode.

That's ok but the battery time is however "worse" than it should be. In the example its maybe 4 hours, when it makes 6 hours in win7 and ACPI mode. How is it possible to run this kind of laptop on ACPI mode?
I saw few suggestions on the net to update the bios (but I do not have windows installed on the laptop...).

By the way Ubuntu works great on the acer timeline but I had some bugs using openSUSE.

thanks for comments.

Have you surfed to http://www.lesswatts.org?

Then there's all sorts of things you can trim - screen brightness, scheduler (use conservative for most power saving), hotplug cpu cores, etc, etc.I wonder where you got the windows figure from if you don't have it installed? Also, on the disk drive, it could simply be a driver issue in the kernel. What's the chipset? You have recompiled your own power-miser of a kernel, haven't you?

Thanks for the link, looks interesting!

well, the win7 was on the laptop when I bought it but there is no way to make a recovery USB stick. You are forced to buy an external dvd writer and burn something like 4 dvds... to make a long story short I was frustrated with windows and installed openSUSE, but got problems to boot and it just worked perfectly when changing the ACPI into IDE mode, except for the power usage.

I have a intel pentium core duo SU4100, 1.3GHz, 800Mhz FSB. I think the problem lies in the harddisk compatibility, I read somethings about that in the net. Its a SATA Hitachi HTS45050B9A300

"You have recompiled your own power-miser of a kernel, haven't you?"
I don't think so. What do you mean by that?

thanks for help

Going through choosing options for minimum power usage. Conservative governor, for instance, and hotplug everything that can be hotplugged. You can read mail and surf on one cpu core, and one stick of ram, if the system supports that. Plenty of guides up there for a power saving kernel.

For those interested, I found a way to run ubuntu 10.04 in the AHCI mode (sorry not ACPI)instead of IDE on the ACER timeline 1810TZ. That might save some battery power, I have to check it out.

You just have to update your bios. You can do it without windows using a USB stick and UNetbootin, its all described http://www.netbooktech.com/tag/acer-...-instructions/

I used the BIOS 3310 from the acer homepage. The file that you have to execute is not a bat file as described in the link above, but ZH7_3310.exe (that I would just copy in the directory of the USB drive, here called C

However, be careful handling around with BIOS, that can have bad consequences (backup your files).