I’ve been rather quiet lately, so time for the latest news:

1) The input part of acer_acpi (the keyboard quirks) has been accepted by Dmitry Torokhov (the input subsystem maintainer) into his tree. This will be going into 2.6.25 – this means that if you have one of the laptops that requires the old acerhk keyboard quirk to make the extra scancodes work, you won’t need acer_acpi just for this fro 2.6.25 onwards. (This code is not acer_acpi specific, so I’ve never been happy with it just sitting in acer_acpi).

2) No news on any other upstream front I’m afraid – wmi & acer-wmi (the upstream port of acer_acpi) are _still_ waiting to be reviewed by the ACPI maintainer (not that I’m getting a little irritated now after three months…)

3) acer_acpi 0.11 will hopefully be released soon – I’ve not had any word of the device autodetection code breaking horribly. Quite the contrary, reports so far indicate that it’s working quite well, so it’s almost time to inflict^^^^^^release it.

4) There appears to be a bug with OpenSuSE 10.3 and the wmi-acer/ wmi module –

https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=352648

I’m aware of it – but currently have no clue as to why it doesn’t work on OpenSuSE, yet works on the same hardware with other distributions.

After re-reading an old readme & history file bundled with a different release of Launch manager (the one available for the Aspire 1690 – same version as the 5020 version, but this EXL806WW.BLD.txt file is missing from the 5020 release), I finally figured out that:

1) It is actually possible to auto detect hardware on older Acer laptops
2) That I had originally misread this file, and that this can be done via ACPI-WMI

So, after ordering myself a firewire (aka ieee1394) cable, I’ve been able to play about with remote kernel debugging in Windows (unfortunately, forcing ACPI into step-by-step mode isn’t useful on a single machine, as it completely locks the machine and you need a remote one to force Windows to go to the next step. And the Windows kernel debugger can only do a remote connection via serial or firewire).

The result is that:

1) I can detect bluetooth on my Aspire 5020
2) I can take a good guess at how wireless detection works
3) I’m not sure on the Mail LED detection, but I do have some ideas.

Hopefully, this should be portable to the other older AMW0 type 1 laptops (and, fingers crossed, the non Acer laptops that also fall into this category). (In theory, based on Wistron’s comments in the driver, this method may well be portable to acerhk and wistron-btns, in the sense that the WMI interface on these laptops is just a front end for the old BIOS calls).