No sound from live cds' with knoppix, freespire, mepis and linspire. With knoppix when boot, sound device is shown as nVidia corporation nForce audio processing unit, driver = unknown. My sound card is Creative Sound Blaster Audigy MP3, motherboard Abit NF7 -s v2.0. Went to Control Center and to Sound Configuration Utility 0.57 to probe for PnP cards to be configured. Error message said 'No Sound modules found. You don't seem to be running a kernel with modular sound enabled (soundcore.0 was not found in the module search path). To use sndconfig you must be running a kernel with modular sound as the kernel shipped with Debian GNU/Linux or a 2.2 kernel and sound must be compiled as modules.'

The live distro seems to have sound support compiled in, instead of as modules. If the distro dosn't have the driver for your card, then it wont play - which seems to be the case for you. IFAIK: knoppix can use drivers from your hdd to enable otherwise unsupported hw. But your best bet is to install... the full distro will have the support your hw needs.

Try at boot time adding "alsa=emu10k1" to the kernel parameters line. If it won't work, try "snd-emu10k1=HW" or "snd-emu10k1=ALSA".

I disabled onchip audio in PC BIOS and sound works on all distros. Thanks for the help.