First of all, love the way that fedora recognized the drive. couldn't have been easier. I booted up for the first time and (aside from fedora's refusal to include mp3 recognition with XMMS) i had instantaneous optical sound streaming into my reciever. love it.
a few things:
i'm told that i can get my remote control (creative rm-900) to work under KDE to control a whole bunch of shit, but didn't have a whole bunch of luck with it. that would be cool, though, and i'm sure that with a bit of fiddling it'd be possible to control XMMS with it. maybe i'll look into that.
one thing i'm a bit puzzled about is the firewire port. i don't own any firewire devices, and didn't even realize that the card had a port until a few weeks ago (heh. i've had the card for what, 3 years?). does anyone know how it works? can i use it like any other firewire port - transferring data between machines, devices, etc?

a nice drive.
spencer

No problems, Gentoo Livecd recognized the soundcard as Creative labs Live, driver was and is emu10k1.o, no sound issues or hassle @ all. After installing Gentoo on my computer (Asus P4G8X, Intel 7205 "Granite Bay" Chipset, P4 Northwood 2533@2717MHz, AGP locked @ 66MHz, PCI @ 33 MHz, FSB 133@143MHz, 2 x 512 MB DDR1 dram @ Dual channel, 2-3-2-6-1), i compiled the kernel with the OSS sound core as module but without the driver for the SBLive, then i installed another driver package downloaded @ http://sourceforge.net/projects/emu10k1. Yet ist possible to switch between analog or SPDIF (coax & Optical on the ext drive) for audio output, for input & Recording should do more testing, but i'm sure this work well. Effects like Chorus, hall, equalizing, etc works using some scripts & programs included in the driver package. Also programs to load patches for midi Synth and an emu10k1 assembler for create some custom effekts ist included. Passive or Active (prologic) Surround matrix works well. ImhO one of the better soundcard Linux driver. The only weakness in the driver package is the poor documentation, this should create some trouble with people without knowledge in Synth basics and DPS programming, but for me not a problem.

P.S.
Sorry for my poor English, i speak Italian, but have some basics in German + English Languages.

C/C++/Java rulezzzzzzz, i Love Linux & Girls & 3D Programming

The kernel based emu10K1 driver works excellently. I've got 5.1 sound on my system, or at least sound from all my speakers, and the ability to control all the speakers.

The only issue I've had is trying to the the remote (RM-1500) working. I can get it to were I can see the input from 'cat /dev/snd/midiC0D1' (or D0, can't remember anymore) and see that the remote is in fact talking to the IR receiver, but I can't get it to interface with XMMS or anything else like it's supposed to do. Not really a big issue, though. Just one of those annoying things.

The sound is much clearer than any soundcard I've used on Linux, and my opera doesn't break up and distort anymore, so at least the highs are pretty clear. The lows seem very clear and responsive, too.