Straight from best buy with new sound card....and still doesnt work...Its just frustrates me to hell...I just can not run linux right,i had old computer it couldnt run linux cuz of graphic card,i have new one now,it doesnt support my wireless and doesnt support sound card....jesus christ wtf....i got internet fixed and now its sound card,just got new one (creative sound blaster live 24bit..) and it doesnt work is it fixible or what kind of sound card i should get so it does recognize by linux right of top !!

P.S. Iam gonna try to install Gentoo,so how should i compile kernel so it works with sound card and my ATi video card??

The ALSA Project supports a large range of Creative cards, and I wouldn't be surprised if yours was included. Take a look through their site - it's pretty informative. Most new distro's come with a full complement of the ALSA drivers. To see what sound drivers your system is currently using, try in a terminal; If the drivers are loading, you should see 'snd-emu10k' or similar somewhere in the output.

Before you go to Gentoo, try this:

$su -
$alsamixer
Configure bars with arrows, enable or disable service with "m" key.
When done ESC
#alsactl store
P.S. If you have 5.1 speaker system, be sure that LFE channels bars are all way down and [off]. LFE channel is to generate 5.1 emulation matrix on 4 speaker systems.


P.S. I hope you know that building personal nuclear reactor is easier than installing Gentoo

First of all: If you don't feel absolutely confident with Linux donn't install Gentoo. See that's a convicend Gentoo advocate who's telling it.

Normally you shouldn't have *any* problem with a soundblaster card. SB are 100% supported. Perhaps your problem is trying ot configure it, when the card was indeed already configured.

First thing to check, before trying to reconfigure a soundcard is checking if the card has been unmuted: Kmix or Gnome-alsa-mixer will do the work. Check also if there is an icon representing a speaker in you panel / task bar: If the sondcard don't work the speaker appears crossed wit a red bar.

Second thing to ckeck if you are using KDE / Gnome is if the sound has been activated in the desktop: K Menu > Control Center > Sound and configure the settings. In Gnome look in Gnome's own control center.

One thing to keep in mind when you post asking for help is telling us which distro you are using, specially in regard to soundcards as every distro has it's own setup tool.

Before jumping to Gentoo I would give SUSE a try, as it's (IMHO) the distro which includes better hardware recognition and autoconfiguration and also the distro which can offer a better experience to the new user including a shallower learning curve and a faster ooverview of the many features of modern Linux systems.

Ah, and if you finally decide to give Gentoo a try, take it easy, Gentoo is not specially userfriendly to install, but there is help available and lot's of documentation... And there is also a nicer way to install a Gentoo system using Mayix [http://www.mayix.net], a more userfriendly Gentoo based distribution.

Thnx for answers,i had knoppix 3.8 live cd to see if my sound card supported before i try to install gentoo,the only reason i want to install is because you build it yourself,i wanna give it a shot and try to install it with handbook they give,some people who have gentoo say it its not really hard if you use documentation,and i think it would be the good way for me to learn from console

snd-ca0106

don't expect everything to happen automizically pray and spray style

the reason to get away from winblows is you are not allowed to be in controll
Linux you are allowed/actually have to take controll but that controll makes it a little harder at first
but alot easier in the long run because you can fix things rather than like windlows where
you just have to wonder why nothing works and that's as far as you can get with it
other than putting a ring of salt around the thing to keeps the deamons out.

I tried to install Gentoo on my old computer,but somehow when i use fdisk and create all partitions like handbook says,it wont write changes....
when i type W in fdisk,it says cant write to /dev/hda

Use cfdisk, so that you can see what you are doing.
Erase all the partitions and partition again. I can't understand why fdisk is unable to write to disk, the only thing which coul be is that you partitioned and repartitioned again so that the filsystem tables wasn't written yet when trying to write them again.

You must partition, write and reboot.

If you need help with Gentoo instalation open a new thread, please, as it's surely interesting for many people
Every problem someone could find is can be a hint for others and a also for the developers.