I August my wonderful wife presented me with a new computer. (She gives good anniversary presents!)
To make a long, agonizing story straight I am having very little luck getting linux on it.
I had to wait for the new kernel nefore anything would work at all due to support for the disk controller. As of nowI have tried ubuntu "breezy" which won't finish it's install due to disk read errors (5 separate cd's that read ok on other machines). OpenSuse 10.1 installs but won't boot to finish the install. It just puts a couple of colored lines at the top of the screen and freezes. I can boot into a rescue prompt but don't even have an editor to look at config files. It is the only distro so far that "sees" all of my hardware properly (as seen in the installer). Mandriva 2006 enters the fray as the only distro to boot and be useable. It does not see my usb or serial ports though and this is a big problem. I only have dialup at home, but no connectivity at all is useless. The kernel is configured for usb but no devices are assigned. When tried manually it doesn't work. I also tried Arch 2005 and Gentoo with no luck. Knoppix won't even boot on this thing.
I use the noapic nolapic irqpoll pci=noacpi options to get things going. I'm not 100% sure I need the noacpi option but it was suggested.

Bottom line is that I need to fix the problems in Mandriva, or find a distro that will work on this machine. Some boot option I don't know about, etc. If Suse can see the hardware plugged into the usb and serial ports, and Mandriva can do everything else, there has to be a way to get something going.
Any help is greatly appreciated. First brand new, (not homemade) machine I've had in years! I never thought your hardware could be too new.

Thanks
Mark