I think my advice would be to quietly put the X-Fi card in a clean plastic bag till the 2.6.31 kernel emerges with a driver built-in; (I confess we bought an X-Fi second-hand without proper checking of hardware compatibility; it too is carefully stored now, and a very cheap Audigy was sourced; that was easily configured in YaST
(and it seems to boom out plenty of noise ..)
so that's what I would advise: most comments about the X-F drivers were rather scathing ...........