Does the X-Fi (non PCIe) sound card work in Linux?

[Deja Q]

So far, the PCIe variant does not. :(

I can either swap out cards with the PCI X-Fi in my secondary machine.

Everyone keeps saying an add-in card will provide better quality and do its own processing (rather than the CPU) so I'm going to forego the embedded sound system on my Asus P5Q Deluxe Mobo...

I'll be downloading Ubuntu 8.10 shortly (Fedora's free version is said to be a mere test bed for their pay-for version and while that was stable the thought of a new download wrecking the OS* unnerves me, and I've ran into more than enough problems with SuSE 11.1 to not bother with them anymore :( )

Thanks!


* two people on techrepublic had that happen to them.

[RoyGBiv]

1. You might have more luck ...

The problem here is friggin' Creative and their damn drivers. It's a nightmare to reverse engineer the things, and, at least as of the end of last year when I looked into this, the drivers for the PCIe version still had not been released. (FWIW, there are nice, reverse engineered drivers for most of the older Creative cards, and Creative has raised holy hell over them. THEY'RE NOT OFFICIAL!!! Okay ... fine, they're not official. They still make your hardware work better than your software developers do.)

There are some hacked drivers out there that some people can get to work, but that's no guarantee of course.

The PCI version isn't a walk through the park either, but it's possible as there is an official driver for it; however, it's still a beta and has been for a long time now. If you're trying Ubuntu, I notice that there are several threads on the Ubuntu forums dealing with getting them to work. I've find that once a goodly portion of the community tackles such a problem, a solution, if one is possible, is generally found.

So, bottom line ... I'd try it anyway.

Regarding your comment about Fedora, that's the way all the corporate-backed versions of Linux work. Nothing wrong with it. It's how they get the funding they do. Fedora is the community/OSS version of Red Hat Enterprise. Novell has openSUSE that gets worked on and stabilized to provide SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED). In each case, this is what they sell, along with support contracts.

It's the same thing, though. It's just been tweaked out the wazoo to make it as stable as possible with your typical organizational network.

As for wrecking the OS, I'm not trying to be sarcastic here, but how exactly does one do that with Linux on a home machine? Assuming your disks are partitioned properly, even if you so completely bork something that even the thought of fixing makes you consider taking up solid waste disposal as a new hobby (been there, done that), you just reinstall the thing.

Anyways ... yeah ... the newer Creative cards and Linux can be a pain in the ass.

[Deja Q]

2. Yipes.

Thanks for the info.

As it stands, I enabled my mobo's sound system (Asus P5Q Deluxe) and am living with that until proper X-Fi drivers come out thanks to ALSA.

And you're right re: Fedora and OpenSUSE. Of those two I now prefer Fedora (OpenSUSE 11.1 being a shambles), but Ubuntu has the edge over both of them with stability and, yeah, ease of use. :) So easy to use I had trouble tracking down how to use "su" - rather smart on their part to lock it out by default...