I have been going round in circles trying to get either the utterly terrible on board Intel hda sound card to work at all (I have one on my laptop which I can get to work after a fashion but it's piss-poor with, for example, Second Life) or a Soundblaster Live USB to work as default. (I can get the Soundblaster USB to work with Amorak or as the KDE device, but all other apps such as Firefox don't work.)

I've wasted so much time on this now I just want to give up and buy a PCI card that someone can recommend definitely works with Linux, with none of the terrible pfaffing around that comes with horrible Intel hda or USB audio.

Does anyone have any experience of such a device? I want to basically be able to plug it in, run alsaconf and it just work. On my old motherboard it has an AC97 controller on and it just works. No messing around, no configs, just works and works really nicely. Something like that would be just great. All I want is simple stereo sound out and mic input.

Many thanks.

I'd have a look through the sound card lists on the ALSA site. My card is just a soundblaster 5.1 but I don't do anything fancy enough to know how it rates against other cards. It just works for what I want...