I'm currently running Redhat 8.0 and I'm trying to get my sound working with a soundblaster Live! Platinum sound card. The card is installed, as well as the correct drivers, but when I run sndconfig it says I need to set PnP OS to 'no' in my BIOS.......unfortunately this setting is nowhere to be found in my BIOS....is there ANYTHING I can do to get this sound card working?

Noone has any ideas?

flashed your bios recently? the pnp option has been known to cause a whole heap of problems... if it's not changeable, you might be in a bit of a dead alley.

Have you tried simply modprobing the emu10k1 driver? Boot Linux, open a terminal (the thing that looks like a dos box... but better ) and change to root (su root) and type modprobe emu10k1. Then try to play a sound file... there are usually some to play around with in the directory /usr/share/sounds... oh, and the command to play sounds is play!

Thanks for the help, obviously I'm fairly new at this. modprobe worked, now is this something I have to do every time I boot the machine up or is it something that will have a lasting effect. If it won't, is there a way I can make it have a lasting effect?

Nope! Since it worked fine, what you need to do is edit the file /etc/modules and add a single line with emu10k1 to it. You can also edit the file /etc/modules.conf and add alias sound emu10k1 so that whenever an application wants to use sound, if the module isn't already loaded, it loads it. You need to be root to edit those files.

/etc/modules doesn't exist on my system, I did however find /etc/modules.conf and edit that, to no avail....but sound still works if I do a modprobe...
any other help?

Try making the file /etc/modules and having that line in it.

I added /etc/modules with the line emu10k1 and it still does not work. When I try to play a sound I get the error :

sox: Can't open output file '/dev/dsp': No such device

is /dev/dsp a sound device that needs to be existent or am I completely off the mark?

I solved the problem, thanks to all of you who consistently tried to help me. It is much appreciated from a new linux user. Since sndconfig wouldn't work correctly when I first booted up, and it told me to set PnP OS to 'no' in my BIOS, I decided I would run modprobe emu10k1 (which I knew made the sound work)...and then after I did that I ran sndconfig again......this did the trick! It set up /etc/modules.conf correctly for me and backed up the old copy of it. So Sound is now working! Now all that's left is to tackle supporting my CDRW.....so thanks again to all those who provided help!

Plenty of threads on CDRW probs, I would suggest, if you're using an IDE/ATAPI CD burner (which is likely), that you look around for ide-scsi emulation... hint: it's got something to do with your boot/kernel parameters