Finally got RC4 on the aspire one.
Fantastic work! Wireless, touchpad, hibernate/suspend, resolution... all working out of the box. Also default acpi script working fine (single press on the power button triggers shutdown).
Problems:
1. As before, it's very difficult to use the graphical installer at this resolution, because many scroll screens/lists do not show up. For example, the locale region, the screen where one choose the bulk packages, etc... In the end, I was missing too many options, so went back to the text installer.
2. Wicd does not connect right away to the wireless network after reboot or hibernate/suspend... it tries to connect to the wired network instead, and only after a long while does it go to the wireless one (even though no cable is plugged in). Options to automatically connect and to reconnect on connection loss are checked.
3. Choice of language for gdm does not persist after reboot (only after log out, login). The system language remains the chosen one, but not the login language.
4. Perhaps video drivers for intel chipsets should be updated, but I'm not sure if that conflicts with anything else. Current xf86-video-intel is 2.6.0 (but installed is 2.2.1) and current libdrm is 2.4.4 (but installed is 2.3.1).
5. Had resolution problems when connecting to an external monitor. I had to comment out the HorizRefresh and VertRefresh options in xorg.conf to get the maximum (native) resolution on the external monitor.
This happened both when starting X with the cable plugged in or when plugging the cable afterwards and using xrandr.
6. Hibernate script could also be upgraded to 1.99
7. Get errors when doing halt/init 0... all errors are saying that snd_* modules are in use. But it shuts down anyway.
Very minor issues:
apm says failed (acpid is running)
firefox has evolution as the default mailto program
it would be nice if the splash screen configuration showed a preview of the VL splash, instead of the default.
Thank you so much!
EDIT: Haven't tested card readers yet... chances are it will be a pain, though there are rumours that it will be handled better with 2.6.29.