P. wants to learn Spanish, and it will be easier for him if he has someone with whom he can practice. I don’t necessarily give a shit about speaking Spanish, but…meh, whatever. I have Rosetta Stone, but it wasn’t installed, so I decided to install it. Of course, it runs only on Windows, so I booted into XP. That went well enough, even if I did wait 10 minutes for the DVD to load in Explorer (and ended up removing/reinserting the disc because Explorer got “confused” and forgot what it was doing) and even if my goddamned antivirus did interrupt twice (once for signature updates and once for a program update). I got Rosetta installed, fired it up, selected Spanish, Level 1, and…had no sound. Goddamn. XP does that sometimes–loses all sound even though it reports that all hardware is working correctly, and even though I just finished listening ti “Djävul Eller Gud” in Ubuntu, and the card was working fine. Okay, I’ve been here before, so I know the only thing that will work is to remove and reinstall the fucking card. No problem. I check the junk in My Documents, in hopes that I still have the driver download, which is fucking huge because there’s no way to download just the driver; you have to get a bunch of bundled software with it. Fine. Off to creative.com, and….can’t find the right driver. Okay, so let’s try letting it auto-detect the card and see whether it will give me the right one. That doesn’t work with anything but IE, so close FF and open that godforsaken piece of shit IE. Great! It knows I have an SBLive! 24-bit, and helpfully downloads the driver….somewhere. It asks whether I want to start the install, so even though I don’t know where in the temp files it put the install, I want to get the show on the road, and I say “Yes”. The install runs, taking up my entire screen with its splash screen and one tiny active window in the middle, which pisses me off because I don’t need or want to stare at the Creative logo for four minutes, but it runs apparently as it should, and (since Windows is a POS), I have to reboot. I do that, then open my Music folder and try to play Arsenie TodiraÅŸ (goddamn, he’s HAWT). No sound, and XP is complaining about some sys file that it can’t locate. ARRRRGGGGHHHH! For Christ’s sake, this is a PCI sound card from a major manufacturer, not fucking rocket science, and there’s no reason XP shouldn’t be able to make it work, at least with basic features, like…oh, I dunno…SOUND. Okay, so we’ll have to reinstall the driver…except I don’t know where it is because it was downloaded as a temp file. I could look, but decide it will probably be faster to just go download another copy, but this time, don’t use the auto-detect. I poke around Creative’s site, don’t see it at first, but finally, I notice the tiny link at the bottom of the Live! driver page that says “Show all”. No shit–it’s waaaay down at the bottom in 8pt Arial. The drivers for their new, expensive cards are, of course, at the top, but I don’t need another card, I JUST NEED THE FUCKING DRIVER FOR THIS ONE! Okay, so we’ll start the download…holy fuck, it’s 63.3MB. For a driver. Okay, for a driver (usually a few KB), and a bunch of bundled shit that I don’t even want, but it’s the only way to get the driver, so I have no choice. The download speed is going at 1/5 of my available bandwidth, and it’s still not finished even as I type this. I’ll have to remove the card (again), run the full-screen install (again), reboot (again) and then hope it doesn’t complain about the missing sys file (whatever it is…again).

Now, let’s compare this catastrofuck with getting the very same SBLive! 24-bit card working (with surround sound) on Ubuntu….

Step 1: Install Ubuntu.

That’s it–built in support for supported cards, which includes the Live! and Audigy series (except for the cutting-edge new ones–that might be iffy). Didn’t need a reboot because sound card drivers aren’t part of “the” kernel and don’t affect the OS itself (as they do in a monolithic setup like Windows); they are in a separate module. You know–the sensible approach. Okay…download’s finished, and let’s see whether I can get some sound. Not that I remember what I wanted sound for in the first fucking place…