I have an Acer 4000 but all the problem with the Acer is all the same no matter what serie you have. The reason why the Acer's are complicated to configure with linux is because Acer seems not to be too compliant in developping linux drivers for their laptops and their hardware is very modern and mostly unsuported yet in most distro
But there is alot of post and patchs in existance to make everything work, if you take the time to do it and read
Im running the lastest slackware distro (one of the most complicated distro to configure as it works wirth xorg.org rather then xfree86)
At first boot the only things that worked are the DVD, The video card(with crappy drivers) and the network card
The things that didnt work are the Soundcard, The wireless and The Battery(all the ACPI controls)
Im not sure for other distro but im pretty sure its all the same
The soundcard though in some more mainstream distro like RedHat might work at boot and so will the wireless but not the battery support because the problem with Acer is that it has what is now known to be "Smart battery" which if to my understanding i think that Smart battery is controled by the BIOS where as regular battery is controled by the OS (or ther other way arround) And it is not fully developped yet
For the sound card check this post which I have written not long ago on how to install intel8x0 based sound cards (for xorg.org) which is the sound card that is in the Acer laptops
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hreadid=332709
These were the steps that I did to get it working
Then for the wifi I have not written the steps yet but like ronware said, you need "ndiswrapper" which i think is a pluging that allows to run windows drivers on linux since there is no linux drivers for the wifi card of the Acer laptops i think
For the ACPI, like ronware, I have not yet manage to get it fully working but I did manage to get ACPI to install but because ACer uses SmartBattery there is another patch which is the SBS patch that is required to modify the DSDT files in order for the battery to be recongnized and read by the battery monitor. It is a very complicated procedure which I am still in the process of getting it to work but i know that it does work
Althoug in slackware to install ACPI is simple enought
get into the linux source tree usually (if you installed the source)
/usr/src/linux
then type
make menuconfig
then in the menu go to
General setup ---->
then go all the way down to
ACPI support --->
then press "y" to all of the options execpt maybe for the debug mode (if you dont need to debug ACPI)
Then exit the menu and save the config file
then still in the linux source tree you have to recomiple the kernel
the best way for me was with
make dep && make clean && make bzImage
after compilation is done go to
/etc/
and type
lilo
this will add an entry to you lilo file so that you can have the choice to boot with the untouched kernel or with the modified with ACPI support kernel
This if it has worked correctly will add the following to you system tree
/proc/acpi
if it is there then ACPI has been install and if you go to
/proc/acpi/battery
and it is empty, it is because it is not detected (which is the problem related to smartbattery with the Acer laptops) if there is something it is because it is detected and the battery monitor should actually work
have fun