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A great resource of help is the Linux on Laptops page, where a lot of reports of Notebook Linux installations as well as helpful descriptions for the different components can be found. Another useful resource are the LiLAC pages. A colleage of mine, Thorsten Kukuk, also provides some useful info on the Acer TM512T.

I additionally bought a PS/2 bridge cable (about EUR 10,-) to simultaneously connect a Mouse and a Kbd, a Kensington lock (about EUR 30,-) and a case.
The Acer TM512T has been tested by the german c't computer magazine in summer 1999 and proven to be one of the best for the price.

• Use fips20 to shrink W*n98 partition unless you want to erase it completely.
• Do normal installation using linuxrc/YaST.
• XFree86-3.3.4 (and later) supports the NeoMagic chipset. SaX sets up your XF86Config file. Switching from XF86 to the text console sometimes requires the F-keys to be pressed twice.
• The Synaptics touchpad normally emulates a PS/2 mouse. There is support for the extended features by gpm-1.18, which you can also use with X11 by using gpm -t synps2 -R and putting Protocol "MouseSystems" Device "/dev/gpmdata" into /etc/XF86Config. I've been told that W98SE does leave the Synaptics in a strange mode, sometimes. Using the synaptics driver of gpm-1.18 or plugging and unplugging an external PS/2 mouse seems to help ...
• The sound is supported by either the esssolo1 (in 2.2.1x kernels) or the ALSA drivers. Maybe some commercial OSS drivers also exist.
• External screens can be used by putting the approriate options into XF86Config (extern_disp). option "power_saver" in the Device section also is a good idea.
• External PS/2 mouse works after restarting gpm; external keyboard can be operated in parallel to the internal one.
• The UDMA patches of Andre Hedrick are required for DMA support of the ALi EIDE chipset. It will be included in SuSE Linux 6.3.

NEW (2000-02-16): Acer put an updated BIOS R01-A3H on their german web server, which solves the problem, so you don't need the parameter any longer, if you update your BIOS.

APM then works mostly. The battery works for approximately 4 hours with normal Linux operation. Standby (Suspend to RAM) works and puts the Notebook in a low power mode. This can be achieved by Fn-F3, by closing the lid or entering apm -S.
However Hibernate (Suspend to disk), to be activated by Fn-F4 (or apm -s)does not work as supposed. If a suspend file has been created by the W*n9x sleepmgr, then the BIOS does write the RAM onto the disk, like with W*n98 operation.
However, those blocks are unreadable afterwards!!
The resume operation takes two hours of funny disk noise to no avail. The disk contains CRC errors afterwards!! Fortunately those can be recovered by writing to the damaged locations using dd or dd_rescue.

Acer has no solution for this problem yet ... and no official Linux support for their Notebooks.

NEW: I got the Software suspend from Gabor Kuti to work with my 2.2.13 kernel. Please look here!

NEW (2000-02-16): On the Linmodems page, you can find a binary only module (5.68) for Linux for the Lucent WinModem. Unlike the last one (5.65a), this one seems to work in principle. For those not being focused on using RedHat-6.1, which the module was compiled for, here are xdelta patches to make a 2.2.13 resp. a 2.2.14 module from it in order to allow it to be inserted. Note that this is risky and might cause your kernel to crash. Now, I won't tell you how to use xdelta!