Please excuse my lack of brevity...

I'm new to linux, and I gave Mepis a try a few months back, since it a "newbie" distro. Everything was autodetected except my onboard sound card. I've got a Dell. I found out that Dell onboard sound cards come in a variety of flavors, and some are incompatible. The suggestion offered to me was to go to Walmart and pick up a bargain Sound Blaster.

So I picked up a Live! 7.1.

I found out that I shouldn't have picked that one. I get distorted sound, but my card work fine in Gate's world, so it's not a bad card.

I also tried Xandros, and KANOTIX, so I know it's not a distro problem. When querying Creative Labs, they told me that my card is currently unsupported for Linux, and that I could check back in a few months.

It's still unsupported.

So I want to just give up on this card and get another. I've already found it a home in an exclusively XP machine, and I'm prepared to get something for mine.

Obviously a PCI card, but I don't need anything fancy. I've only got a 2.1 speaker setup, so I don't even need the 5.1, 6.1, or better, just sonething which stands a good chance of working Distro-wide.

Any suggestions?

Hi and Welcome to LQ.org. Get a Sound Blaster with emu10k1 chipset. They are known to work very well with Linux and it's not that expensive. I've a SB Audigy myself and it worked fine with every distro I've tried without extra effort (exception for Libranet, but that took two secs to fix through their adminmenu).

Good luck!

I also have SB Live! 5.1 and it works fine on Slackware, SuSE, Debian and even FreeBSD