SB X-Fi on Ubuntu 7.04

[AMDZen]

THe consensus seems to be that there is no way to get X-fi working on Linux right now, Ubuntu or otherwise. Every once in a while, however, i see that someone or other was able to get it working with some nonofficial drivers, but never get anything more on it.

Anyone have any idea if there are any drivers out there? And if not, when SB/Creative will release some?

Everytime I decide to try linux again, there is some part of my hardware that isn't supported. This makes it really difficult for anyone to even want to try linux much less switch to it. I'd never run it as anything other then dual booted with a Windows OS, but how the heck do people even run things like MythTV or other such things when most of the best sound cards and video capture cards aren't supported?

 

[Nothinman]

http://opensource.creative.com/

April 30, 2007 -- Creative plans to make proprietary (closed source) drivers available for the X-Fi series of sound cards. SEE Soundcard Support for updated details. These drivers should have full support for ALSA (playback, recording, mixer, MIDI, synthesis) and OpenAL 1.1 (with EAX effects).

Although personally I wouldn't trust them, it took quite a long time for the SB Live driver that they released to be cleaned up and put into a state where it would be acceptable for inclusion in the Linux kernel. I also think that paying more than $20 for a sound card is a rip off though.

I think for most people the onboard sound is good enough although some other decent cards (TurtleBeach maybe?) are supported. For capture cards the MyTV website has a decent FAQ that covers all of the requirements.