My Acer laptop has some pretty awkward hardware, like software controlled wlan card. Anyway, I've been reading tutorials and some of them go on about installing kernel modules? How do you use these kernel modules? And also, how do you pass kernel options at boot. Is it through the boot manager? (lilo for me). Disorganized question I know.
A Kernel Module is nothing essentially special or unique, all it is, is a modification to the Kernel to load (for example) a function such as a filesystem or a device driver. Hence this is what you need.. What i would recommend is Ndis Wrapper, this was designed essentially for linux systems that did not have support for certain hardware components, allowing linux to run off Windows drivers. Have alook into it: http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/ I use it on quite a regular basis at work, mainly for Wlan cards, or wireless devices such as USB Wireless NIC's. It's pretty simple to use, you should be ok with the tutorials, any queries just post.
What distro are you running? Mandriva 2006 has some great provisions for wireless cards, in fact it was easier for me to setup an unsupported wireless card in Linux that it would have to do so in Windows! This was for my sister's PC - I just used Mandriva's wireless setup tools, used ndiswrapper with the Windows 98 driver on the adapter's driver CD, and configured the wireless network encryption settings, etc. The whole thing took about 2 minutes.
My distro is Mandriva 2006. I found an article describing getting he various components working on linux on the exact same laptop, so it was helpful was in in FC4. The problem with mine is, its not simple hardware. To activate the card you have to be using some Acer Launchmanager so you can enable and disable the card with an external button. So the card is software controlled. I think I got the drivers necessary to get it working though.
