Getting your SB Live! to work (with minimal pain)
Written By: Morganth

Let me start by saying that getting the SBLive! to work under linux is probably easier than getting it to work under Windows, as long as you have some grasp of what you're doing. It basically involves you getting the emu10k1 driver (emu10k1 is the chip on the SBLive board) and configuring the module in one file and at the command line. So, let's get started, and finish up in a timely fashion.

Getting the driver
I'm going to tell you how to do this from the command-line, so it's easy for ya to follow the directions. First, I'd head over to your home directory, and make a directory for your project.
cd
mkdir sblive
cd sblive

Now, invoke the following in a xterminal:
ftp opensource.creative.com
(or ftp://opensource.creative.com in your browser)
Enter anonymous as your "name"
and a real or bogus email address as your "password"
cd /pub/snapshots/
ls emu10k1*
get emu10k1-[newest date].tar.gz
where newest date is the closest date to present, dummy. It'll be listed there ;-)

Ok, now we have the driver downloaded!

Uncompressing and compiling
The next step is relatively easy, just follow these commands:
gunzip emu10k1<tab>
tar -xvf emu10k1<tab>
that is, hit the [tab] key in order to auto-complete your line, to save you some keystrokes
cd emu10k1
which is usually the extract path, but it might not be
rm *dep*
make depend
make clean
make

Superuser, Copy, Edit, Probe, Reboot, Viola!
The next few steps are relatively intuitive. First off, we gotta become root for a few minutes--we're modifying precious system files and copying to unpermissioned directories.
su
Password: [your root password]

Then, since you're still in your emu10k1 driver directory...
ls emu10k1.o

Is it there? Good! If not, go back to uncompressing/compiling. You did something wrong ;-) Now we have to copy it to our modules directory. The next few steps of installing the driver can sometimes be bypassed by running
make install
in the emu10k1 directory... however I found that under both RH 6.0 and 6.1, when I first got the driver, the make install would plop my emu10k1 driver in the wrong directory, that looked something like /usr/lib//misc (those two forward slashes aren't a typo). If it works for you though, it works for you...

Findingyour modules directory is tricky, since it's different with every single fricken distro. But... here's what we can do.
cd /lib/modules
that part is always the same
ls

Now, check out those version numbers. You probably want the newest version number, sometimes there's an "mdk" tagged on the end of it. That's alright. Once you find what you think is the appropriate one, change directory [cd] into it. Invoke an Ls and you should see a bunch of directories naming device categories. There should be one called "misc." That's our guy. So let's change directory [cd misc] into there. And now, let's copy our file:
cp /home/[username]/sblive/emu10k1/emu10k1.o ./
depmod -a

Now let's edit conf.modules to reflect our new driver:
echo alias sound emu10k1 >> /etc/conf.modules
what that did, if you're wondering, is echo'ed "alias sound emu10k1" to the screen, and than sent that output to the end of the conf.modules file. Quick, one-line editing.

If at the end of your install, the sound isn't working, it's probably due to the above step being incorrect. Some distros I recently found out have their conf.modules stored in other files. I'd reccomend you check your respective distro's manual or help files to find out where it's module configuration file is.

Anyway, now let's probe the sucker.
modprobe emu10k1
it may/may not say "no dependency file found for emu10k1.o" It doesn't matter. Sometimes this has happened to me (on some computers), other times it hasn't.