The date of this post was July 24th 2009, it has been edited and updated over time however read the whole post before following the guide, especially the paragraph starting “A quick bit of advice”.
After two months or so the guide I posted for installing an X-fi card on Ubuntu could use a little update, so here goes. This guide is very similar to the guide posted in May, however it does include updated drivers and a bit more info.
A quick bit of advice, Ubuntu 9.10 and Linux Mint 8 have out of the box support for Creative X-fi sound cards through their built in ALSA driver. Also the drivers in this guide are old releases, I strongly encourage everyone to upgrade to a newer install of Ubuntu/Mint (if that is an option).
Quick message of warning from the driver developer:
Note that the ctxfi driver might conflict with the HD-audio driver.
So it’d be nice if you save the output of lspci before loading the drivers and let me know if any problem happens. Also, at testing, please check the kernel message. If this conflict really happens, try to build without hd-audio, that is, run configure with “–with-cards=ctxfi” option in addition to others, and test whether it works with this workaround (better after reboot to reset the board info by BIOS).
A quick tip from John:
After updating the kernel the drivers will need to be compiled against the new kernel header files. To do this simply follow the guide again, all steps this ensures the latest Alsa drivers are used.
A quick input from Jo:
If gnome-sound-properties doesn’t work for whatever reason, you can access it via System > Preferences > Sound.
The How To:
Step 1:
First off you can get the latest most up to date version of the drivers from here: Alsa Snapshot FTP
Step 2:
Now we need to setup the system to be able to compile these files so, open a terminal and use the following commands:
1 2 3 4 | sudo apt-get update apt-cache search linux-headers-$(uname -r) sudo apt-get install linux-headers-$(uname -r) sudo apt-get install build-essential |
Step 3:
Now we need to extract these packages and then compile, so browse to your download location, for the sake of this guide, we are using the desktop:
1 2 3 4 | cd ~ cd Desktop tar -zxf alsa-driver-unstable-snapshot.tar.gz cd alsa-driver-unstable-snapshot |
Step 4:
Now we are in the folder of extracted files, we need to grant relevant permissions to what we need:
1 | sudo chmod 700 configure |
Now we run the configure file:
1 | ./configure |
This runs the configuration as root, now we need to make the files:
1 | make |
Next we install the package:
1 | sudo make install |
Step 5:
The ALSA drivers are loaded by default on Ubuntu, so this should be setup complete, reboot the machine to find out.
Important, by default the drivers are muted, adjust the volume through the Alsa mixer:
1 | alsamixer |
This command opens up the mixer for Alsa itself, use tab to move between “input”, “output” and “all”, left and right to move column to column, up and down to adjust volume. Then once adjusted press escape to exit. The mixer starts off on mute for the card, what you are after is similar to this:
You can control the volume using the Gnome sound controls.
1 | gnome-sound-properties |
Make sure all the boxes read ALSA.
All done.
A few small fixes if you run into trouble:
On a related note, Pulseaudio has been known to cause issues with the Alsa drivers, if there is a problem with your sound, e.g. cutting out after a while, try removing Pulseaudio. This has not caused me any issues, however there was mention on the Ubuntu forums that this caused problems with Amarok. A small note, these problems do not occur for everyone so do not follow this step unless you are experiencing issues and need to troubleshoot.
1 | sudo apt-get remove pulseaudio pulseaudio-utils |
John suffered trouble where the X-fi drivers weren’t loading at startup properly, he fixed this by adding the following line to the “etc/modules” file:
1 | snd_ctxfi |
If you have any other suggestions to make this guide more user friendly, leave a comment. 
I would just like to thank anyone who has contributed through the comments section, specifically John and Jo.
This site is maintained by James Travers a 19 year old 4th year student in the field of computing and networks. As an avid user of Linux and open source software I want to spread the advantages of using free software, and give help and advice where I see it required. This site was started as a way of posting answers to questions posed by users about many topics to do with computing, the site then grew into a small knowledge bank of useful information for Linux, Windows and even OSX users.
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