No problem with my desktops or laptops.

Laptops:
IBM Thinkpad 600E, using the NM256AV chip: Works fine using the Alsa cs4236 driver.
Dell Latitude CPi 300XT, using the CS4232/4236: Works equally well with Alsa

Desktops:
Abit NF7-S revision 2 (nForce2-based): Works fine with nVidia's nvaudio module. It also has a SB Live! Value card (only for the game port ), which works equally well with the kernel emu10k driver.
Asus A7V with a CMI 8738 sound card: Works very well with the kernel cmpci driver

Looking forward to bring Linux to my girlfriend's pretty Compaq/HP Evo (IBM 8xx chip I believe).

Håkan

I've got to be lucky then. I've never ever needed to do anything to install my sound card. It works right out of the box. One sound card is a Sound Blaster Audigy in a Intel P4 - 2GHZ and the other one is P2 - 400 MHZ with a Zoltrix. All Linux, and I repeat, all Linux distributions I've tried, made the sound card work right away, no tweaks, no drivers... nothing. Worked with everything, Desktop, MP3, Ogg, Avi, DivX, games (WineX, no problems, Nwn (a little problem with KDE sound system conflict, no big problem)...

With Slackware 9.1 I've got some problems in my Zoltrix box. But most likely it was me forgetting to install some Alsa package (shipped with Slackware). I've reinstalled the System and checked carefully if everything with Alsa label on it was installed. And it worked, right out of the box, no tweaks, no drivers, nothing needed.

I've a pretty old laptop also, Compaq Presario, 166MHZ with Slackware on it... by simply typing modprobe sb, I got it working. Again, no tweaks, no drivers, right out of the box... Again, I might have luck

Only 2 channel sound with the installation of Redhat 9.0 & SuSE 9.0 on my desktop. I had a very Linux savy friend sit down at my computer and was unable to get it working also. No sound at all on my Dell Latitude CP M233XT with either Redhat or SuSE. LQ forum will be happy to know this is my last post here. Any questions I have will be researched and not posted. After way to many posts on my part I still have not acomplished anything other than a basic install.

I run Mandrake and Slackware and have never had any sound issues. I listen to music constantly on my desktop and I also watch dvd's with awesome sound. I really don't know what kind of "issues" you had with sound but not posting is kind of silly. Have you tried any of the stricylt RH or Suse sights. RH has not been the most desktop friendly disto out there and I have never run Suse so I can't comment.

SuSE 9.3 Pro managed to detect and install appropriated sound driver for it but whenever I play VCD via Kafeine player 0.5, there is no sound.

You probably need to load the win32 codec package.

Installed Kubuntu and had no problems at all with my on-board sound, (tried Fedora 3 too with no problems). Used to have no sound on my Mandrake 9.0 and also with Suse 9.0, but that's it.
Try Ubuntu and see how it goes.

MIDI problem....

I have installed red hat 9, which detected the integrated CMedia. Installed realplayer 10 for musiv and mplayer for video, everything works fine for WAV and MP3's.... but no luck with MIDI. I've used the KMIDI player, when I try to play a MIDI file, I get a message that /dev/sequencer is being used by another application. What should I do???

Ricardo

ubuntu - esd - out of the box
arch - alsa - 20 min

Debian Sarge, Kernel 2.6.8.2, Creative Sound Blaster 7.1, ALSA...
Been trying to get it going for a couple of days now...
still no luck

My Sound Blaster Live! (em10k1 chip or something) works perfect with all distro's I tryed so far:

-Knoppix live (KDE)
-Ubuntu live (Gnome)
-Kate OS live (xfce)
-Xandros installed (KDE)

No delay or whatsoever. Unreal Tournament 2004 works fine too. Have not tried Quake3 (windows version) yet.

2 sound cards, an Audigy 2 and an ens1370 for the MIDI interface, and a virmidi device.

All is working fine with alsa and jack.

The bad things is arts on kde, I can do what I want, it append sometime at I get a "sound device busy". It is why i have not installed arts on my last install, and all is working just fine.

A big issue for serious audio work is the kernel, it need realtime and all the major distros have kernell oprimised for server and office work, not for multimedia. It is why my last install is Agnula-DeMuDi, a sound focused distro with a realtime kernel.

I have reproduced this kernel on my 2 other distros, SuSE and gentoo. And all is working faster, not just the sound. Really amasing!

Do you need root privaliges for it?

No, I don't need root privilege, and it is the point.
I just run jack as normal user and realtime priority.
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...95#post2026995

It takes about 15 minutes to do emerge alsa-driver alsa-headers alsa-lib alsa-utils alsa-jack alsa-oss and setting the mixers. The sound card that I used is Audiotrak Prodigy 7.1 that produces the best sound for the computer. The disadvantage of this card is it does not have hardware mixing, so software mixing have to be used. Unreal Tournament 2004 has problems with the sampling rate (16000 Hz instead of 44100 Hz), but by just exiting the game and running it again fixes the problem.

I set the kernel to server for high bandwidth. I just set the frequency to 1000 Hz. The premptive kernel settings just made my system too slow. I have not yet setup jack, but it does record audio in real time at the highest sampling rate and bit resolution.

Installing ALSA is no big deal. Setting up software sound mixers is a pain because software sound mixers are not transparent to each program.

I am thinking of writing a module that wraps around ALSA and OSS modules that sets up additional PCM inputs for the desire sound card that only has one PCM input. In simpler terms, a software sound mixer.