I am completely new to linux. When booting I get an error about apic and IRQ timers. I have looked up fixes to this such as adding the noapic option to the kernel. Unfortunately I don't know where to go to add this option. If someone could please tell me exactly how to to this from square one I would greatly appreciate it.

Thanks

there are two ways of booting linux, LILO (LInux LOader) and GRUB (GRand Unified Bootloader). Which one are you using? it's different fo reach. What distribution are you using also?

It's LILO, I am using the KnoppMyth distribution.

Does anyone has any advice?

It's never a good idea to badger for advice, if people have advice and time they'll give advice when they have the time

You can do it manually on a per-boot method, when lilo starts up it'll have something written somewhere (vague, I know) telling you to push a key to get a lilo prompt. When you get the prompt you would normally be able to boot your system by typing either "boot" or "linux" or something like that. Instead of whichever of these works, type "boot noapic" or "linux noapic".

But you probably want to make it permanent, this means editing the lilo.conf file which tells lilo how to load Linux.

Find the file called lilo.conf, it's probably in /etc and will probably look something like:

When you load it in an editor (I use Kate for this type of thing), what you need to do is EITHER edit the line that starts with "append=" or create a new one if it doesn't exist. So



becomes

Don't worry if your lilo.conf blocks look different to this one, it's just an example. Important thing is 'append="noapic"' goes underneath the root=/dev/hdaX" line where X is the number of the hard drive.

Let me know if you need further clarification, it's 9:00am and I've only had two coffees.