After I got X running again late last night, I didn't look too deeply at how everything else was working. One thing that stopped working was the Synaptics pad. Before X died (and was resurrected) the Synaptics driver was loading and working fine. But that was with my own kernel, not the stock 2.6.11 for FC3. I did some more googling and found that I might have to disable the psmouse driver from the kernel. This driver is built into 2.6.11 by default – it's not a loadable module – so I had to recompile the kernel with this set as a loadable module. Actually, I doubt I need it as the acer aspire 1691WLMi doesn't have a PS/2 port for the mouse. It just has USB ports.
I also found another potential workaround for the battery problem. The suggestion is to patch the kernel to expose some SMBus interfaces, then compile a Smart Battery driver. The README in this tar file also suggests disabling ACPI for the battery (CONFIG_ACPI_BATTERY) and the AC adapter (CONFIG_ACPI_AC) in order to use the legacy interfaces for these. This package says that all known battery monitors use the legacy interfaces anyway, so I shouldn't need these to use gnome's battery monitor. I won't know if that's true till tomorrow, probably.
More fodder:
Some discussion about using a live cd distribution called Kanotix with the Acer Aspire 1690.
A potential firmware update for the DVD player. This might fix the dvd read problems. I know that the drive reads CDs just fine. So it's just a DVD read issue (and probably a DVD write issue, though I'm no where near trying that yet). Be careful with this one – I don't know if this is really for this drive or not.
Interesting to note that many of the online discussions about this laptop say that it comes with variations on the graphics driver. I have the intel i915 GM but others have the ATI x600 or x700. I can't find too many details about the DVD drive unless you look in bios. That firmware update doesn't appear to be for this drive if you got by filename and what the BIOS reports (a Matsushita or something like that).