Anyone who has this laptop:
what is the suggested distro for it?

I'm currently using SuSE 10 release, and have a couple problems:
1) battery indicator doesn't work at all, unless plugged in it says -1% charged.
2) NIC card won't work. Lights blink when cable inserted, but wont get a DHCP address. I saw this problem in a review of the laptop on this forum, but no one posted a respnose to it.
3) won't run tuxracer or any 3dgames because there is aparently no 3d card, but in winblows it runs quake 3.

This comes down to a couple of things, first if your BIOS version is 3a24 then you can download a custom DSDT for the battery indicator. If not then sorry your OFL (out of luck).

Both the wired and wireless NIC's work just fine. I did have to build a custom kernel for support for the wired NIC to work, maybe you should look into doing something like this yourself. I'm using CentOS-4.2 x86_64 myself.

The wireless NIC also works after a visit to the ndiswrapper page. You might want to visit them and try using ndiswrapper for either/both of your NIC's (instead of building a kernel for the wired NIC).

My NIC's for comparision reasons;

00:04.0 Ethernet controller: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] SiS900 PCI Fast Ethernet (rev 91)

00:0b.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4318 [AirForce One 54g] 802.11g Wireless LAN Controller (rev 02)

As far as the 3d portion you may need to built a custom kernel with support for the video controller;

My VGA controller (again for comparision);

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] 661/741/760/761 PCI/AGP VGA Display Adapter

wow ok
how do i check bios revision?
wheres the custom dsdt?
i have no idea how to do a custom kernal.
i already used ndiswrapper for wireless, but wired seems to be recognized
which lappy do you have?

You check the BIOS version by entering the BIOS at system startup (press the F2 key), the verion is listed on the first BIOS screen.

The custom DSDT is at; http://acpi.sourceforge.net/

Building a custom kernel is not that hard, but you should do some reading before attempting the first time. This holds true for installing a custom DSDT also. Check out The Linux Documentation Project for HOW-TO's for both; http://www.tldp.org/

My Acer Aspire 5000 is an AS5002WLMi-100GB running a custom 2.6.14.3 kernel with a custom version of CentOS-4.2.