acpi apic problems nothing works

[tryingtouselinux4years]

Hi.

About every 6 months or so in the last few 4 years I try Linux again, but there is always something that does not work. So I keep giving up. Because the issues are always hardware/driver related and thats too much for me.

This time, during the past 3 days I downloaded the newest Live CDs/DVDs from Knoppix, Kubuntu, Suse and FreesbieBSD. And nothing works. Always it tells me ACPI problems, MP-BIOS bug 8254 timer not connetcted, freezing, crashing etc. I flashed the newest BIOS from ASUS (my mobo M2N-MX). I contacted ASUS yesterday, they sent me an even newer BIOS (0801, its just several days old), still no go. I changed options in BIOS setup. I disabled ACPI, I changed from ACPI v1.0 to 3.0 etc. etc.
I booted ACPI=off, noapic , PCI=bios etc. etc. even I have no ideas what these things mean, I just found them googling etc..

I spent more than 10 hours without success.

My question. Is there any hope for me to get LINUX working? Is there any LINUX version that has no ACPI , APIC problems? Or do I have to give it up for another 6 months, hoping that one day I will be able to stick the downloaded and burned CD into the drive and it will finally just work?

[Storm Rider]

I've been having trouble with the same board. Tried a few different distro's, same result.

So far, I've found that the boot option "noapic" has been working on livecd / livedvd.

I'm not sure what changing the acpi version in the bios will do. So I haven't done it. Same for simply disabling acpi / apic. Until I know what it will do to the overall functionality of my system, I'm going to leave it alone.