after two years, creative has finally released a beta x-fi driver... http://connect.creativelabs.com/linux/Lists/Announcements/DispForm.aspx?ID=3 The link to the file download (before the usage agreement) is http://us.creative.com/support/downloads/download.asp?MainCategory=209&nRegionFK=&nCountryFK=&nLanguageFK=&sOSName=Linux®ion=1&Product_Name=Sound+Blaster+X-Fi+XtremeGamer&Product_ID=15853&modelnumber=&driverlang=1033&OS=12&drivertype=0&x=24&y=5 Note that this release is apparently only for x64. Reproducible: Always
This might be a bit tricky... according to http://connect.creativelabs.com/linux/Lists/Announcements/DispForm.aspx?ID=4&Source=http%3A%2F%2Fconnect%2Ecreativelabs%2Ecom%2Flinux%2Fdefault%2Easpx the driver source apparently doesn't compile with GCC > 4 at the moment. I'm hoping for this in portage as well, though, some time.
A howto for this driver using, making use of GCC 4+ is at: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-587921-highlight-xfi.html I haven't gotten it to work yet, but some have. Might be used to create an ebuild in the future.
Created attachment 163625 [details] media-sound/creative-xifi/creative-xifi-1.18.ebuild I've recently witten a new ebuild for the 2nd beta 1.18 release so far I've not managed to get this to work (still problems with loading ctalsa) but this might be of some use to someone else with different kernel configs also it could be re-used for future releases For info the module depends are currently screwed up within the source, which means things have to be loaded within a particular order at runtime the modules should be auto blacklisted within /etc/modprobe.conf to prevent them from auto-loading at hot-plug or udev at boot in some random order but just to be sure, run update-modules after the emerge to make sure /etc/modprobe.conf has been updated with the blacklist info there's a basic script under /etc/init.d/ctsound that should load the modules in the right order / uses mknod (until we can patch for udev) it's a strimed down version of the original creative ctsound script however I'm still having problems with ctalsa myself so it's difficult to test Note this is experimental, make sure you have another kernel setup within grub that you can boot to just in case the blacklisting doesn't work for any reason also when unmerging (emerge -C) the directory /lib/modules/<kernel version>/kernel/drivers/ssound will need to be removed manually as emerge will likely not remove this directory
Created attachment 163627 [details, diff] files/XFiDrv_Kernel-1.patch
Created attachment 163629 [details, diff] files/XFiDrv_Gentoo-1.patch
Created attachment 163630 [details] files/ctalsa_blacklist
Created attachment 163631 [details] files/ctsound
Created attachment 163634 [details] media-sound/creative-xifi/creative-xifi-1.18-r1.ebuild slight error in the original I missed
Created attachment 163658 [details] bug.message this is just a copy of the bug I'm getting within dmesg and /var/log/messages when loading ctalsa even though the bug is generated it appears to be working with gentoo sources 2.6.23 at least
xfi-drivers-1.00 in portage. Sync and test, please.
I can't test on on the platform since I don't have an 32-bit install to do so, but I believe the latest X-fi driver from Creative is supposed to work on 32-bit as well as 64-bit if you wanted to keyword it ~x86 as well.
