ACPI Battery status on Acer TravelMate a-550XV

Hi all.
I'm quite a newbie in kernel hacking, and the same (and maybe more ;) ) in acpi
hacking.
So, that's my problem: with vanilla kernel acpi support I was not able to see my
laptop's battery status, and for acpi AC Adapter was online all the time (it
showed me on-line also if really the cable was not on).
So, I tried to apply acpi-20021101-2.4.20-rc1.diff.gz to a 2.4.20-rc1 kernel,
and something seemed to have changed...
The AC Adapter status works fine (it reflects the real status on/off-line of the
cable), the power button also works fine, but the battery still doesn't work :(
I use "acpi" cmd to view the status, and, while the first time I run it, it
always outputs me:

lilith:~# acpi -V
     Battery 1: charging, 98%, charging at zero rate - will never fully charge.
     Thermal 1: ok, 37.0 degrees C
  AC Adapter 1: on-line

starting from the second time, it outputs me the real status, something like
this:

lilith:~# acpi -V
     Thermal 1: ok, 50.0 degrees C
  AC Adapter 1: off-line

..and the battery couldn't be viewed anymore.
I tried to unplug the battery, and then replug in (while the laptop was on AC,
obviously), and I received some error messages:

    ACPI-0251: *** Error: Looking up [STAT] in namespace, AE_ALREADY_EXISTS

..and obviously the battery still doesn't exists, for acpi.
I tried to look in the drivers/acpi/ dir, and to work around the error, but I
couldn't be able to do much... :(
Some hints?

My laptop's an Acer TravelMate a-550XV, some OLD informations about what I done
on it can be found on http://www.CS.UniBO.It/~gonano/a-550XV.htm , and at the
moment I run on it Debian unstable, with acpid-1.0.1 and acpi 0.06.

Thanks in advance...

Adieu,
-- 
Lestat de Lioncourt  -- a.k.a --  Ciro Mattia Gonano
 Undergraduate student in Computer Science at University of Bologna
 IHGGer #1049   <=>  ICQ#: 52631406   <=>   URL: http://www.CS.UniBO.It/~gonano
 Debian admin at Students.CS.UniBO.It <=> look at headers for my JabberID & GPG