Has anyone heard anything about this card and linux?

I have a Dell system (Dimension 4550) and had one of the proprietary Dell SBLive! 5.1 cards. Although supposedly ALSA 1.05 and later will work with that card, I never could get it running. I installed 1.05 then 1.06 and never could get the thing working. I've been lurking this and other linux forums trying to find an answer to no avail. Lots of references to the problem, but no HOW-TO anywhere.

So last night I figured I'd go and get a new card, right? Granted, I'm on a tight budget, but OK.

I look around and the least expensive, decent looking card is this thing called "Sound Blaster Live! 24-bit". I figure this is just the latest rendition of the product line.

Get home, plug in the card, get it running under XP (after a little confusion, the default setting was for digital only output). Try booting under Linux - no sound card found (verbose boot, then with mandrakes hardware util). Thinking maybe I had messed something up while trying to get the Dell card to work (and having only recently installed the distro), I killed the Linux partitions and did a fresh install. Still no card.

I seem to have swapped one problem sound card for another, newer problem sound card.

Query - has anyone know anything about this card? Is there a way to get it running or should I return it to the shop? Does anyone know how to get the darn Dell SBLive card to work instead?

I'm fairly new to Linux, but I'm picking it up quickly trying to fix this.

try running lspci as root this will give u the output of what pci cards are in your machine, and as such should give reference to your soundcard.
If it isn`t there is it enabled in your bios?

Well, I know you wont want to hear this but the Live 7.1 you bought is the same animal pretty much as the Audigy LS. The Audigy LS has most of the features of the Audigy, but uses a differant DSP and the emu10k driver wont work with it.

However, it is supported in alsa 1.0.6a and above. Here is the page for the driver development: http://alsa.opensrc.org/index.php?page=audigyls

The alsa module is named snd-audigyls, so if you see an option in your kernel to enable that module or to compile it in, that should do it for you.
Progress on this driver seems to be moving quickly.