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.