I might go back to Ubuntu.

Yes you read it right, not entirely out of free will though.

In short, my laptop has some serious power management issues; If I understood correctly, the kernel continually receives interrupts from the battery, which somehow confuses it. This results in the OS never really knowing the state of the battery, or whether or not it’s running on AC power or on battery.
Sometimes the info displayed in /proc/acpi/battery/BAT1/state is correct for like 5 seconds, but most of the time it isn’t. Causing warnings of low battery, dimming and undimming of the screen, etcetera. All very annoying things.

Additionally, suspend and hibernate don’t work either. And it being a small laptop, intented for dragging along almost everywhere I go, it’s kind of essential that I manage to get that working properly.

So why would Ubuntu provide a solution that isn’t possible under Arch Linux ?

Well, it doesn’t, but System76 does.

System76 is a U.S. based company that sells computers with Ubuntu Linux pre-installed. One of their notebook models, the Darter Ultra, is actually the same as my MSI PR200, both based on an MSI barebone. I would have bought myself a Darter Ultra, but unfortunately System76 currently only ships their products to the U.S and Canada.

Anyway, Darter Ultra customers have of course also noticed the power management issues of their laptop, and System76 staff have responded quickly by adding a fix to their System76 Driver, which only seems to be available for Ubuntu. The fix for the battery issues seems to be just adding ec_intr=0 to the kernel parameters of your /boot/grub/menu.lst. I also tried this on my Arch64 install, and it seemed to work.

However, that is not all. The System76 Driver also includes some other stuff, which should allow you to suspend/hibernate as well. Currently only for Ubuntu 64-bit, I think.

So instead of booting into Windows Vista, which I have to admit, I have been doing most of the time. I’m going to install Ubuntu 64 and give that System76 Driver a go.

Fingers crossed …

PS: More info on this issue can be found on the System76 Support forum, which is part of the official Ubuntuforums.