I found the reason for the above problem: It was the result of running a kernel requiring PAE on a cpu without PAE support, which otherwise doesn't seem to have any adverse effects (see bug #930447), but BIOS calls obviously do not work properly. Installing the non-PAE kernel solved the problem.
I post this in case anybody else needing acerhk has a Pentium M processor …
I found the reason for the above problem: It was the result of running a kernel requiring PAE on a cpu without PAE support, which otherwise doesn't seem to have any adverse effects (see bug #930447), but BIOS calls obviously do not work properly. Installing the non-PAE kernel solved the problem.
I post this in case anybody else needing acerhk has a Pentium M processor …