I have always been interested in trying out Ubuntu and I did once. The only problem was I could not get my sound card to work with it, so that ended that. Now that about 6 months have passed I decided to give it another go and this time I was successful.
I asked the question on the Ubuntu irc channel, not expecting any response or help. I was wrong someone did help me right away and gave me the instructions to do it and to my surprise it actually worked. I will list those steps below just in case anyone else finds themselves in a similar setup.
Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Setup Instructions For Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex)
“wget http://ccftp.creative.com/manualdn/Drivers/AVP/10792/0×0343D29/XFiDrv_Linux_Public_US_1.00.tar.gz”
“tar -xf XFiDrv_Linux_Public_US_1.00.tar.gz”
“cd XFiDrv_Linux_Public_US_1.00″
“sudo apt-get install build-essential linux-headers-`uname -r`”
“make”
“sudo make install”
Then I went to System->Preferences->Sound and set it up like the image below.
After I did this I had sound. Amazing what sound can do to make Ubuntu so much more usable. Is this the best way to do it? I have no idea, but it works for me and gets me using Ubuntu.
on Jan 4th, 2009 at 7:35 pm
Hey I have the same Sound Card on my Dell, and I am currently Running Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex 64-bit, however, when I tried the wget command it throwed me a 404 error (NOT FOUND) apparently I have reached the server (66.250.188.93) but the file or the directory requested wasn’t found.
Any other place where I can look for this driver, I have tried OSS but when Ubuntu updates itself it kills my sound, and since OSS is not integrated to the operating system as ALSA is, there are some things that don’t work.
on Jan 14th, 2009 at 5:10 am
I did everything as you wrote, and the drivers show up in the restricted drivers list, but I don’t have those devices in the “Sound Preferences”… Any suggestions?
on Jan 14th, 2009 at 2:51 pm
Hey Iveen,
you can download the tarball right from Creative’s site, extract it, then follow the instructions in the ReadMe (which are the same as the ones listed here, I do believe).
Link to the download: http://support.creative.com/downloads/download.aspx?nDownloadId=10792