With 2.4 series of kernel and aureal-1.1.2-cvs driver from http://sourceforge.net/projects/aureal/ you have to use gcc 2.96
for compilation of kernel AND driver, because it uses closed source
modules. (Disable also APIC, if you enter having hang-up problems
with UDMA modes enabled for harddrives when playing audio. /proc/interrupts should show some errors, if this is the case)

After failing to deal with my onboard sound card correctly, I installed the Aureal and the using apt-get installed alsa-lib alsa-lib0devel alsa-driver alsa-utils and kernel-mdoule-alsa

Then, I rebooted and Kudzu autodetected the card and modprobed snd-au8810 . But even then, when I rebooted it didnt save settings. So, you need to create a .asoundrc as per the Au8810 instructions on http://alsa-project.org

These are excellent cards in spite of their age. It's a shame that they never made any with 6-channel support. All major features work; hardware mixing, hardware eq, front and rear speaker channels, mic, simple 3D and reverb effects, etc.

Many thanks to Manuel Jander and the OpenVortex project for making these great ALSA drivers. I have like 5 of these cards, of various makes and models. You can buy a good quality (genuine) Vortex 2 SQ2500 on Ebay for as little as $5.00.

ALSA support was merged with the ALSA tree around the release of ALSA 1.0. As a result, kernel 2.6 should support it. I personally use them with 2.4.22.

I can verify that the following cards work;

Aureal SQ2500
Xitel Storm Platinum
Diamond MX300
Turtle Beach Montego II (I've not verified if the Digital I/O or other daughterboards work though, since they are non-standard)
Generic SQ2500 GOLD with the TriTech codec.

Most Aureal hardware uses the SigmaTel STAC9708 4-channel codec, which is well-supported on Linux.

The OpenVortex project is also probably working on adding DLS midi support and HRTF surround capability.