Reply #1: You might have more luck ...

[RoyGBiv]

The problem here is friggin' Creative and their damn drivers. It's a nightmare to reverse engineer the things, and, at least as of the end of last year when I looked into this, the drivers for the PCIe version still had not been released. (FWIW, there are nice, reverse engineered drivers for most of the older Creative cards, and Creative has raised holy hell over them. THEY'RE NOT OFFICIAL!!! Okay ... fine, they're not official. They still make your hardware work better than your software developers do.)

There are some hacked drivers out there that some people can get to work, but that's no guarantee of course.

The PCI version isn't a walk through the park either, but it's possible as there is an official driver for it; however, it's still a beta and has been for a long time now. If you're trying Ubuntu, I notice that there are several threads on the Ubuntu forums dealing with getting them to work. I've find that once a goodly portion of the community tackles such a problem, a solution, if one is possible, is generally found.

So, bottom line ... I'd try it anyway.

Regarding your comment about Fedora, that's the way all the corporate-backed versions of Linux work. Nothing wrong with it. It's how they get the funding they do. Fedora is the community/OSS version of Red Hat Enterprise. Novell has openSUSE that gets worked on and stabilized to provide SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED). In each case, this is what they sell, along with support contracts.

It's the same thing, though. It's just been tweaked out the wazoo to make it as stable as possible with your typical organizational network.

As for wrecking the OS, I'm not trying to be sarcastic here, but how exactly does one do that with Linux on a home machine? Assuming your disks are partitioned properly, even if you so completely bork something that even the thought of fixing makes you consider taking up solid waste disposal as a new hobby (been there, done that), you just reinstall the thing.

Anyways ... yeah ... the newer Creative cards and Linux can be a pain in the ass.