Bad characters in Asus A8N-VM CSM

[Adriaan de Groot]

I just picked up an Asus A8N-VM CSM motherboard. It's a nForce 430 + GForge 
6150 integrated mini-ATX job, amd64, very 1337 and new. That means trouble :) 
I knew that when buying it, and know now that it really needs work to get it 
working at all.

FreeBSD 5.1-R amd64 boots just fine on the machine, so I do have _some_ tools 
for the machine. 6.0-R without ACPI hangs, and 6.0-R with ACPI craps out 
immediately with the following error:


ACPI-0397: *** Error: NSSearchAndEnter: Bad character in ACPI Name: 43035350
ACPI-0381: *** Error: Looking up [0x43035350] (NON-ASCII)
in namespace, AE_BAD_CHARACTER
ACPI-0204:
ACPI-0213:

(not all error messages copied entirely). What's a good approach to dealing 
with this? My plan doesn't go much further than

1) Update to latest BIOS

and then futz about. Suggestions? FWIW, I haven't found a Linux yet _either_ 
that boots and recognizes the devices on the board (2.6.15 seems more 
promising than 2.6.10, which fails with no NIC and no HDD drivers).

[ade]