Hello!
I have a Creative 5.1 sound card, and the problem is that I hear everything only in two channels... Maybe someone can help me configuring this sound card? I just don't know where to start...

I have Fedora Core 5 64bit version.

Thanks in advance!

Open a terminal and run . You will be presented by a mixer, which you can use to turn channels on and off, and set volume. Use the "m" key to turn channels on and off, and the up and down arrows to adjust volume. The right and left scroll keys will scoll the display right and left: there are a bunch of sliders off to the right you cannot initially see.

I have the same card running on FC5 32 running just fine. Normally, there is a utility called "alsactl" you also need to run to set the volume levels so they will be remembered, but apparently Fedora does not have this installed by default, so they may have some other mechanism that remembers the levels.

Let me know if this works for you.

All my channels are at 100%, and still I hear only 2 in XMMS...

Hmmm. I have the exact same card (SB Live! X-Gamer 5.1) and just listened to some Korn (.ogg's) using Rythym box and got all four channels. I haven't used XMMS in quite a while, but I don't think the player makes a difference. This may be a really stupid question, but are the cables to your speakers in the right sound card ports? I made the mistake of plugging mine in wrong ones one time and couldn't figure out why I had no rear channel sound...just a thought

Your question is not stupid, but my cables are ok, I use this sound card in windows too, and everything works good...
Maybe you know why I don't have sound at all in games like Enemy Territory, or America's Army?

Thanks!

I was going to ask whether you dual-booted to Windows, so that answers the question of whether of not the system works in Windows. I can't speak for why you don't have sound in your games because I don't game in GNU/Linux, but I can only assume it may be a configuraiton issue. You stated earlier the front channels work fine when listening to music, but the rears don't. Is something in the game setup causing the lack of sound? Are these native (Linux) games, or are you running them through Wine?

They are native Linux games.
But the problem is not games... The problem is sound in general. I can't hear my rear speakers, my center speaker and sub...

Well, we seem to have the same sound card, and the only difference I can see is you are 64 bit and I am 32. I am pretty stumped at this point, except to think maybe there is something related to alsa that is installed on my system and not on yours. I assume your card was properly detected when you installed Fedora, right? I thought about asking you to run the "System" --> "Administration" --> "Sound card detection" app, but not sure if this is the same one that gets run at install time, so it may not do any good. I wouldn't think there are differences between the alsa sound systems on 64 and 32 bit platforms, but I don't know. Let me see what I can figure out and I'll post back later...

No probs! Thank you very much! By the way, in the Sound card detection tool, it detects my sound card, but it plays only from the two front speakers...

Maybe I need to install some Creative driver? Or the alsa driver is good enough?