I recently moved from windows to linux and I'm still quite a n00b so here's my issue:

I first installed opensuse 10.0 and after that updated to 10.1 as soon as it came out. Only by then I realized I was unable to play midi files.
I have a sound blaster live! player 5.1; I use what is standard in suse which I think is ALSA which by its own turn is using snd-emu10k1 as the driver.
According to what I have been reading at this forum and all along this soundcard has hardware midi support (correct me if I'm wrong). I've tried many programs, among them rosegarden, kmid, notedit, and amarok (wich is using xine as engine) and none of them are able to play midi files (by playing I mean give any output in the speakers), some of them even give error messages that suggest they couldn't find the device.
Through yast2--->Hardware---->Sound there is one option available to install sound fonts. Don't know if this is of any use; even if it is I've already tried to put the original creative drivers cd in the cd drive as requested during the soundfonts installation process but it was unable to find the sound fonts.
I've been told to use timidity but I'm not sure if this is the solution, since this is usually (as I far as I understood) used for soundcards without hardware midi support. I've read something too about midi mappers, don't know what those are though or if they are the solution.
Finally I searched SMART (since I'm using 10.1 and yast package manager as of the initial release is completely broken) for packages containing "alsa" and this surely got me a little confuse as I've found a package named kalsatools at which description was "KAlsaTools implements five programs. KAConnect displays all the ports of theALSA MIDI sequencer and lets you open and close connections between them. The scope and spectrum analyzer, KWaveView, visualizes sound data captured from Line In or Mic In. QMidiControl is a virtual MIDI controller box. QMidiRoute is a flexible routing utility for MIDI events. QARecord is a simple WAV recording program." I thought what KAConnect does is what timidity is supposed to do.

So, I request a little clarification plz.

greets,
--zePh7r

Try modprobe snd_emu10k1_synth as root to load the module and maybe modprobe snd_seq_midi if it does not get automatically loaded along with the synth module.