I have a Creative x-fi sound card. I'm using the "official" linux driver from creative's website. The problem is that the sound sometimes doesn't work. I have to restart the computer or even uninstall and install again to make it work. But sometimes it works fine. Any ideas? I have not yet found a pattern in when it works and when it doesn't.

What distro?

When things are not working, have you made sure you are not muted? Look at the mixer settings.

Do you have Pulse Audio running?

Have you checked to see if the driver is loaded when it fails?

Slackware 12.2. I'm new to linux so I'm not sure where to find certain things How can I see if the driver is loaded? What is pulse audio? How do I find the mixer?

Open a konsole. It may be called different things, depending on what is installed, it looks like a dos command prompt. In that window, type the following command, without quotes, just what is between the quotes.
'/sbin/lsmod | grep snd' If the driver is loaded, you will get a some lines outputed. It will look like this:

If you don't get any output, then there is no driver loaded.

Pulse audio is a sound server. It fits in between the sound card and driver, and the output. It allows more than one application to use the sound system at a time.

Different ways, first try clicking on the start button, the one that shows you the installed applications. Usually there is a section for sound. It will be listed there. From a command prompt you can try 'alsamixer' or 'kmix'. If either is installed it will start. If none are installed, you will need to install one.

Last, it helps to know what sound hardware you have. In a konsole run the command '/sbin/lspci'. this will list the hardware installed on the PCI bus. Cut and paste the results here.

I think I've found the problem. I have two soundcards (creative x-fi and M-audio delta 1010). I'm currently only using creative, but I think that linux sometimes uses the m-audio driver. How can I choose which driver to use?

If there is one sound card you do not want to use, you can deactivate it in the BIOS. When you first turn the system on, there is a plain text message on the screen usually that tells you what key to hit to enter the BIOS setup program. It is there for a short period of time, so you may have to boot more than once to see it.

The other way is to unload the driver for the sound card not being used. Then edit the startup scripts to stop the driver from loading on another boot. In order to know the driver by name, open a konsile, run the command 'lsmod'. Some lines may run off the screen, you can modify the command 'lsmod | less' ( with the less command ) the screen will fill, then press the space bar to see one more line at a time. Once you know the name of the driver, you can remove it with the command 'modprobe -r modulename'. Then you can run a test to see if that resolves any problems you are having.

This is Slackware, so we'll have to try and find out what script causes the modules to load. This is done differently on different distros.

I searched the forum and solved the problem in another way. I blacklisted the other soundcard in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist. It's seems to work fine.

Good stuff, thats what I like about linux, lots of ways to fix things...