I was reading an article by Doc Searls of the Linux Journal where he was recounting some of Linus' comments on the recent Linux Lunacy cruise. On of Linus' comments that I found pretty humorous is when the discussion of ACPI came up. He said, "Modern PCs are horrible. ACPI is a complete design disaster in every way. But we're kind of stuck with it. If any Intel people are listening to this and you had anything to do with ACPI, shoot yourself now, before you reproduce." That should give you an idea as to why ACPI is such a pain in Linux. The 2.6 kernel is supposed to have improvements, but I'm wondering if things will be much improved even there.