Greetings all !

I have purchased a new ACER Aspire 3610 and I'm relentless! I will NOT give up until my favorite distro works on this laptop.
I got a version of "SimplyMepis" with a book I bought last year. I installed it on the laptop and got rid of Windows XP right away.
Well, nothing seemed to work ... the sound, the wireless network, battery monitoring and so on.
THEN ...
I downloaded and installed the latest Mepis. Now I have sound; with a bit of a fight I got the wireles network running.
ONE PROBLEM LEFT ...
I cant seem to get the Battery Monitor to display and as a result, the laptop just powers off when the battery runs down without any warning at all.

Anyone have an idea ?

Acer uses a battery monitoring system called "Smart Battery" which is a problem under linux. To get the battery monitor to work requires a kernel patch and some other relatively sophisticated tinkering. I remember looking into it when I encountered the no battery monitor problem on my Acer Aspire 1690. Since I rarely use my laptop running on battery power alone, I never botherd with it. I've heard that there is more native support for smart batteries in the 2.6.13 kernel. If you google "linux acer smart battery" you will find some info on how to start to tackle this problem.

I have an Acer Travelmate 2413 and everything works fine using Suse 10. I tried a Mandriva Live CD and everything worked fine as well. The battery monitor works quite well using poswersaved and kpowersave.