I bought a computer with an X-Fi family soundcard a couple years ago, and was most disappointed to find it didn’t work at all in Linux, so I swapped it out and put it on a shelf.
I heard a rumor that support for it will be in 11.2, is this true?
Thanks!
Yes , its true. Here is a thread on the subject:
Creative X-Fi sound 11.2 x64 ? - openSUSE Forums
In fact, what is also true, is in openSUSE you can probably get X-Fi working on openSUSE-10.3, 11.0, and 11.1 and do not have to wait for 11.2. But you need to install some custom alsa rpms in order to do so.
XFi was introduced as of alsa 1.0.21 and the SuSE-GmbH sound packager (who is also an alsa developer) has packaged a number of rpms of 1.0.21 of alsa, where with very careful installation of the correct rpms, one can likely get xfi working on those older openSUSE versions with 1.0.21 of alsa. One needs to send 6 zypper commands to do this (where the second command in the link I provide needs to be modified - if you plan to try let me know and I can try help you thru it): Alsa-update - openSUSE
As Oldcpu pointed out, X-Fi works right out of the box with 11.2 and I’ve “tested” the backported ALSA on both 11.0 and 11.1 successfully.
So yes, no more shelving for the card.
I never liked creative anyway, they suck even in windows.
I just checked and the 10.3 repos is no longer there. I’m going to update the alsa update wiki accordingly.
So let me correct the above to state:
In fact, what is also true, is in openSUSE you can probably get X-Fi working on 11.0, and 11.1 and do not have to wait for 11.2. But you need to install some custom alsa rpms in order to do so
Actually I’ve never had any trouble from Creative ever since Audigy 2 came out. The original Audigy indeed did have problems with certain systems (and continued to have them) but apart from the initial drivers it’s all been good for me - the first drivers indeed had tons of bugs.
Audigy for Linux has been ROCK solid for me always. A real treat, with full hardware tone control and everything. Wonderful performer.
wiki now updated and references to precompiled alsa packaged for openSUSE-10.3 removed. I put a suggestion to try a webpin search instead.
Thanks for the reply guys! I’ll be ready to download on release day and test the upgrade path.
I can report that the 11.2 x64 RC2 openSUSE Live KDE CD my Creative X-Fi Extreme Music works great out of the box. lol!
This is good news, I’ll have to try it out when I get home. My xfi was in my old box as I never bothered to move when I built a new one because it never worked in Ubuntu, will try it out instead of the crapy on board sound!
Let me answer it this way. I have a XFI Xtreme Gamer card and to make it work with 10.3, 11.0 and 11.1, I had to install the Kernel Source and Basic Kernel Development packages. I then downloaded the BETA driver from the Creative website…after issuing the commands ‘make’ and ‘make install’ - it worked well, with a few microphone issues.
When 11.2 was installed, I did not need to do this, as it detected the XFI and it works great. Though I have not tested the microphone yet.
So if you are still using 10.3 or 11.0 or even 11.1 - you can grab the driver from Creative (they have a Linux version), and compile that as I described above. You will have some minor issues, but it works.
Better yet, upgrade to 11.2 and don’t bother compiling.
Just for information, I have 11.2 (64 bit) with KDE - installed from DVD.
Great news guys! Thanks for the updates.
I concur, X-Fi Extreme Gamer and Audio both work “right out of the box” on 11.2 x86_64.