ACPI - SuSE 8.2 Help

Can anyone help me with ACPI for SuSE 8.2. It seems it is partially enabled and to fully enable it (battery info, etc.) I need to recompile the kernel. Is this correct, or am I missing something, why enable it at all if the battery info isn't enabled? I had ACPI working on this laptop great with Redhat 9, so I know it is possible. I know how to recompile the kernel but I do not want to set every little option manually, is there a default config that I can load from xconfig that I can use to tweak the settings a little and see the way a default SuSE kernel was built? Thanks in advance for your help. David Trotz