I have the Creative SoundBlaster 5.1 Platinum sound card and have installed Red Hat version 9 on my machine. I can't get any sound. When I run the little gui utility that says sound card configurator I get no sound and it says that it can't find the device. I noticed that it is using a driver emu10k1 and when I go to the Creative website I notice that the driver there has the same name. I am totally an NOOB with Linux so please be very clear. Sorry.......So i guess I have two questions: 1.) Is the emk10k1 file the same name for all sound drivers? 2.) Where do I start with getting my sound to work?

Thanx a lot!!!!!!!!!!

Well, at least I can answer the first one: yes and no.
Different soundcards have different drivers; not all sound cards use emu10k1. However, the entire SBLive series, as well as the PCI512 and the PCI128 (I think), all have the same chip set and, thus, use the same driver.
However, the whole problem of redhat not detecting the sound card seems a bit unusual to me; I tried two different versions of Red Hat before and never had any problems with my generic SB Live. But perhaps your driver was never installed in the first place. First, I would try searching through Creative's website and try to find a RedHat RPM for the emu10k1, or see if they have another solution. If you can't find one, I have heard many good things about ALSA drivers (http://www.alsa-project.org), however I have no experience in installing them myself. If you go that route, though, make sure that you get the emu10k1 drivers, regardless.