Haier A20 notebook: several probably ACPI-related issues

[rekado]

Hi, I've bought a new laptop some days ago. Here are the specifications:

Haier A20 notebook
Intel T2370 @ 1.73GHz (Core Duo)
SiS M671 Mirage 3
Synaptics touchpad
Integrated Webcam

I faced severe graphic problems, Ubuntu 8.04 64bit didn't even install at first. Had to start it with the following options:

"noapic nolapic acpi=off vga=791"

Now I can only boot with the options

"noapic acpi=off apm=power_off"

I installed the patched open 2D driver as explained here (http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=615094). I'm still facing some difficulties which might be related to ACPI:

1. With self-compiled 2D driver from Chen Chao Yu at SiS (source under GPL license) videos don't play in full-screen, at boot-up the screen's brightness fades from faint to gleaming, showing a turquoise-grayish pale pattern with a cyan rectangle on the left bottom corner of the screen.
2. CPU load spikes extremely high when doing nothing special but only moving windows.
3. Sound is very soft; is normal when booting with pci=bios_irq but internet connection will fail and system will run very slowly with this option enabled.
4. on boot-up, when attempting to reconfigure xserver and when executing displayconfig-gtk the following error occurs:

   FATAL: Error inserting battery (/lib/modules/2.6.24-16-generic/kernel/drivers/acpi/battery.ko): No such device

5. the web-cam (tested in Cheese) obviously is zoomed to maximum; it also seems that some optimizations are turned on which results in a horrible slowly rendering, overly saturated picture. Is there a way to configure the devices parameters somehow?

Did anyone experience the same weird behavior when using the SiS 2D driver?
Is there any way to get rid of that battery error message?

I would appreciate any help! These errors seem so arbitrary...

BTW: the laptop came with Vista pre-installed and the CPU load also spikes a lot when only moving a window or even doing nothing. But in Vista Aero is enabled - in Ubuntu Compiz doesn't even work because of the missing OpenGl driver, so it may not be a performance problem. Ubuntu 8.04 (i386) works very very well with Compiz on my other Haier notebook (Haier A61 with Intel Celeron 430M @ 1.7GHz [?]) which I bought last year.

[rekado]

I just noticed that Haier A20 is the same as Clevo M721S.

[rekado]

Actually, I think that the problems just come from turning off ACPI at boot time. Without ACPI I also don't have any information about remaining battery life. This notebook is new, so ACPI should be working, shouldn't it?
Is there anything else I could tweak to let Ubuntu boot and keep ACPI support? At the moment when booting with ACPI the boot process hangs when detecting the CPU.