Sound card : Sound Blaster X-Fi ?

[Vincent Trouilliez]

Hi list,

I have just managed this week, to get a colleague at work, to try out
Linux/Ubuntu. He doesn't play modern windows games, just needs
music/internet/e-mail/IM, so I thought Linux would be ideal for him.
However he likes music more than most I guess, and has a "fancy" sound
card, which he paid a lot of money for 2 years ago he said, so he would
be rather annoyed if switching to Linux would ruin his investment.

His sound card is a: "Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Fatality FPS".

I spend some time on www.creative.com.
There I found they released 4 months ago a beta driver for 64bit Linux
systems. Two years after releasing the sound card to teh market, all
they offer is a "beta" driver, and only for 64 bit. On the same site, I
searched their user forums for "Linux X-Fi". From what I read, people
comments were all very negative: the driver is indeed "beta" : just not
fully functionnal, very rough, a proof of concept, far away from a
usable driver. People say Creative doesn't genuinely care about its
Linux drivers, so there is very little hope to see a mature driver in a
"reasonable" time frame.

So I am seeking feedback from you boys (and girls): anybody has
experience on Ubuntu with an X-Fi ? Is the proprietary driver really a
joke ? Is there a community/open source driver available for this
card ? Is it mature/fully functionnal/stable ?

People comments on creative's forum were so negative, I guess it's
a hopeless case and I will have to tell my colleague he must either
give up Linux, or his sound card (and buy something similar with good
Linux support, some on the forum advised something called "Auzentech
Auzen X-Plosion 7.1 DTS connect"... any good ?)... but I wanted your
opinions anyway, to be really sure what to think.


Regards,

--
Vince