Hi. I got a really crappy toshiba laptop, and basically opensuse is the only distro to get past the ACPI incompatibility, despite that hibernation and power management doesn’t work and wifi is unreliable (drops a lot). A few days ago I decided to replace it and a friend at college told me that he have had two Acer laptops (first one stolen) and both worked OOTB in all of the linux distros he used (debian, opensuse, fedora, mandrake/mandriva) and I wanted to know from those of you who own Acer aspire laptops (by that I mean traditional laptops, not the aspire one netbook), How good is their compatibility with Opensuse? and do they get too hot (how good are they regarding internal temperature)?
I knew about it. I was just trying to see if they had a high ratio of compatible models (which they seems to have).
I have Aspire 4730Z with Radeon 3470.
In general, the installation goes smoothly. No crash reported.
All of my hardware is detected.
The laptop is a little bit hotter in processor/graphics region, but still okay.
I find that I have difficulties in connecting to wireless ap, and my battery is not detected until the AC adaptor is plugged in too. And compiz/desktop-enhancement is not working for me.
Aspire 5100 everything OOTB
TravelMate 4220 everything OOTB
No overheating problems with either
what CPU temperature do you get for your Travelmate 4220? mine’s stays at around 50-55°C. Do you get less?
I’ve never had any reason for looking at that.
How would I see what the CPU temp was?
Try the following command:
acpi -t
Thermal 1: active[0], 42.0 degrees C
That’s strange… What graphical environment do U use? KDE4, KDE3.5 or gnome?
Switched back to KDE recently
KDE 4.3.1
I have aspire 5735 everything is working OOTB
temp is 31 C on c2d t5800.
I have an Acer Aspire 4930G with NVIDIA Geforce 9300M and most of the important stuff (wireless, audio) works fine.
Some things might need to be tweaker. For example the audio jack doesn’t switch automatically the audio output. For this a new version of the Alsa drivers must be installed.
You can check my entries here:
HCL/Laptops/Acer - openSUSE
Acer Aspire 4930G [Linux Laptop Wiki]
I don’t have any temperature issues.
I have had an Acer Aspire 3680 for the last 3-4 years, can’t remember exactly, seems like forever. Started with Suse 10.0 and now up to 11.0 KDE 4.3 with no problems. Running compiz and emerald with no need to refresh the decorator like in the old days with Beryl.
Temp 53 deg C, never has seemed any hotter when running Windows (infrequently). I think with 11.0 I had to run the latest ALSA to get sound working properly, but wireless and and everything else works fine.
I love it. Also, I remember seeing my model advertized for sale in in Asia with Linux as the native OS (not Suse specifically), so I think Acer was confident that the hardware was compatible or designed to be so in the first place.
Have a lot of fun!
I have an Aspire 5100, originally with an AMD TL-52 (1.6 Ghz) that I upgraded to a TL-60 (2Ghz) Works OOTB from 10.1 - 11.1. Only problem is the Radeon M200 IGP, no longer supported by the ATI proprietary drivers, but works well using the open source radeon drivers. Idle temps around 35c, load temps 55 - 60c.
I have an Aspire 7520G with the nVidia 8400M. I’ve been running openSuse for several months now smoothly 
I used to have overheating issues,but it’s mostly due to bad maintenance and past overclocking on cpu-gpu (I have the same heating levels at Windows too,so it’s not Suse related). I’d not hesitate to recommend openSuse for a similar laptop build as mine. 
I used acer travelmate 3260, it worked fine(2.6.22), now I use thinkpad T40, it also works fine(2.6.31.5).
I have an Aspire 5930, and have used 11.1 (32bit) and 11.2 RC2 (64 bit) on it. Mostly everything works very well, except for:
*Some of the extra multimedia keys are not recognised
*Booting off the battery with the OOTB boot parameters only works maybe 20% of the time
The first problem is almost irrelevant. The second is a right pain in the behind. I’m still partway through experimenting with a combination of boot parameters, and at the moment the thing that seems to have the greatest effect is acpi_osi=“Linux” With this, my laptop now boots about 90% of the time while on battery power.
All that aside, I’m very happy with my OpenSUSE (KDE) experience on my laptop.
Quick answer to Ski_K2 (Oct. 23rd Post):
I can always check on the temperature when I put sysinfo:/ in the URL (location) box of Konqueror. Or just click the “My Computer” icon, which is probably on your desktop folder.
I’d like to add something. I have found out that if I run “powertop” and enable all suggested settings, the temperature will stay lower. At least it is more bearable than the high temp for my leg…
Unfortunately I haven’t figured out how to make the settings of powertop permanent for the next boot.
LessWatts.org - Saving Power on Intel systems with Linux
There is a package in the official repositories. You have to run it as root.