I just spent over an hour, frustrated and cursing because Ubuntu flatly refused to recognise my SB Live 24-bit. I know ALSA supports it because it worked in the other puter, and I’d disabled the onboard sound (thankfully a BIOS option and not a jumper). No matter what I did, though, it refused to detect it. I thought, “Okay, maybe there’s some kind of conflict” and booted into XP because I’m much more experienced at troubleshooting Win than Linux. I’d installed XP, Avast and nVidia drivers, but nothing else, so I scrounged around and found the Creative driver CD. Stuck it in the drive, it autostarted (haven’t turned off that annoyance yet) and I told it to install the driver. It said it had no SoundBlaster card to drive. Uh-huh. I crawled yet again under the desk, and thanks to the window in the side of the case (it ain’t for geek looks), I could peer in with a flashlight to discover….the card wasn’t properly seated. I’d installed it Friday night, but didn’t notice that it wasn’t all the way down in the slot and hadn’t tried sound because I was fussing with the MBR of one hard drive. I can certainly understand now why Ubuntu so stubbornly insisted it didn’t have a sound device; it can’t be expected to identify what isn’t connected. As soon as it was properly seated and I rebooted, ALSA did its stuff automagically. Duh.