The wireless lan doesn't work out of the box on this Nedion MD96500 because of a kill-switch. There is a small button on the right hand side of the keyboard which theoretically enables the radio of the wireless chip. However this switch only sends some signal and then software is needed to actually turn on the radio. Up until recently acerhk was used for this purpose, but it's unmaintained and can't work on 64bit cpus. Therefore acer-wmi was created and is now part of modern linux kernels. Unfortunatelly it needs to be adapted to this hardware.
For more information see here: http://code.google.com/p/aceracpi/

I contacted Carlos about it and let's see what he finds out.

UPDATE:

Carlos mailed me that this notebook doesn't have the needed wmi interface. So acer-wmi won't get support for this hardware and I'm back to using acerhk.

I installed acerhk from the OpenSUSE BuildService "home:Akoellh/openSUSE_11.1_Update" and did a "modprobe acerhk". Now things work.

The Medion MD 96500 notebook was sold around 2005 by the german discounter market ALDI. I got a used model from a friend for little money and will now use it when on the road.

State of the notebook:
It's mostly working okay, but has some mechanical signs of age:
- scratches everywhere
- the joints connecting the display are worn out and partly broken, have to lean the lid against a wall or something ... spare parts at http://www.laptop-ersatzteile.de/Notebook-Ersatzteile/Medion/MD-Serie/96000er-Serie/96500er-Serie/MD-96500/Medion-Scharniere-rechts-und-links-MD-96500::8085.html?XTCsid=sv5ced009h19hm1ne7vb9hflotqhlick (in german)
- the akku is run down

Support by linux (OpenSUSE 11.1 i586):

Net install using a ethernet-cable worked flawless.

Graphic card was not detected automatically, vesa was used - doing "#sax2 -r" correctly set it up to use the open source ati driver.

Updated to KDE 4.2.2 from OpenSUSE BuildService (KDE4:/Factory)

Removed beagle and compiz

turned on Kwin's desktop effects, they work flawless

wireless lan doesn't work out of the box

fan is not controlled, quite loud