ALSA might help. I was thinking that the driver on SourceForge was a Creative contribution and another alternative. (There were a lot of comments on the project home page about NDAs so I got the distinct impression that that driver might be only semi-open source and not the OSS driver that you get in the kernel sources.) Anyway, ALSA is the driver. The esd and/or artsd programs are sort of like multiplexers that allow multiple applications access the sound resource. At least that's how I've always thought of them. The ALSA driver might help but you'll still need something like esd loaded so that the desktop can easily support sound.

ok im going to download alsa now, see if anything happens

ok I got it. When I try to play something in Xmms I get a "mixer not found or something like that. I then try to play a file, and I just get could not load alsaoutput.o failed and then XMMS locks up. When i try to play a song in alsaplayer, i get a similiar error. Also, when i restart the computer i get a message saying starting alsactl FAILED. Im not sure why its trying to start while everything else is shutting down, but its a problem.
I got alsa through APT and there was a package for "alsa kernel#0.9.2-fr1_2.4.18_27.8.0 I didnt get it cause i didnt want to mess up my kernel already. should I get it?

These are precompiled? Hmm... Could be that some special files are missing (in /dev). Was there a command run called ``snddevices''? If you download the driver from www.alsa-project.org and follow the installation instructions, one of the steps creates device files: /dev/dsp, /dev/mixer, /dev/sequencer, and /dev/midi. Do these exist and have rw permissions across the board? Some of the other messages sound like they might be related to the package installation. But I'm not sure since I went ahead and built the driver from sources on the project web site. None of those errors sound familiar anyway. That package has been, I'd bet, been built specifically for the 2.4.18_27.blah kernel release. I'll you'll avoid any potential problems in mismatches by going the compile-from-source- route but it does require that you have all the packages for the kernel sources, headers, etc. installed.

All the devices in Dev are there and I set r/w permissions. still no luck. I think I'll unistall the packages and try compiling from source instead. Could you give me the links to the file I should get? I tried downloading form there originally the the FTP site was full of stuff I got intimidated and just got it through apt instead, mistake I guess.

Go to the ALSA web site, and click on the lines for the Stable Releases of the Driver, Library, Utilities, Tools, and the OSS Compatibility Library. Then go to the ``Supported soundcards'' page and print the page for the card you're using (Creative SB Live! Value?). Unzip and untar the downloaded files into, say, /usr/local/src/alsa and follow the instructions in that page. Most of these are built using: ./configure <option(s)> && make && make install. Check the READMEs and INSTALLs to be sure.

Good luck...