[ubuntu-uk] Thanks!

[Adam Bagnall]

James Milligan wrote:
>> On 3 Jun at 10:11, alan c <aeclist at candt.waitrose.com> wrote:
>>
>>     
>>> James Milligan wrote:
>>>       
>>>> I've now got a full installation of Ubuntu on my desktop! 8.10 with
>>>> everything working, bar the sound. Dualbooting with XP and modified
>>>> grub boot list menu so that XP is default after 3 seconds (for
>>>> parents and gaming).
>>>>
>>>> As soon as I get the sound working I'm going to upgrade to 9.04.
>>>>         
>>> note that both 8.04 and 8.10 had issues with sound. afaik they  
>>> started
>>> to use pulsaudio sound server and it was not implemented well. I have
>>> found that 9.04 has better sound so give that a try at least live CD
>>> before you complete the scenic route through 8.10, you might be  
>>> lucky?
>>>       
>> I could not get sound working on 8.04 and 8.10 either.  Nor would it
>> work when I upgraded to 9.04.
>>
>> But it did work when I did a separate install into a new partition (on
>> VMWare Fusion on a Mac) of 9.04.
>>
>> -- 
>> Tim Powys-Lybbe                                            
>> tim at powys.org
>>             for a miscellany of bygones: http://powys.org/
>>     
>
> Hmm I don't really want to have to install ubuntu again. I haven't got  
> the time at the moment. Are there any downloads I could try?
>
> James
>
>   
Hi James,
    I'm not sure you'll have luck with anything at the moment due to 
your specific sound card. Creative have not provided very much support 
for the x-fi series. Don't quote me on any of this but I believe they 
released a binary only, 64bit only OSS driver a couple of years ago, 
which is obviously not good due to the fact most people have 32bit 
installations and OSS has been deprecated in favour of ALSA. They 
refused to release any specifications for the x-fi cards and claimed 
they were working on support. There was an attempt to create an ALSA 
driver through reverse engineering but it didn't get very far. Fairly 
recently creative opened the source of their original driver gave a data 
sheet to developers. There is an ALSA driver in testing but it has not 
been officially released yet.I may be completely wrong about this but I 
think that's the current status of x-fi support. I think your best bet 
at this point is to get a cheap generic sound card to use under Ubuntu, 
even a cheap USB one from ebay should do the trick. There is probably 
more information lurking somewhere on alsa-project.org if you want to 
dig further.

Regards,
    Adam.