"Creative's latest attempt at delivering a reliable binary driver was in April when they tried again by releasing a new beta driver. A year after they released their first binary Linux driver, the state of Creative X-Fi on Linux was a horrific mess. Following that, a Novell developer then began porting the Open Sound System X-Fi driver to ALSA, but it wasn't in the best shape possible and the developer didn't even have any X-Fi hardware.
"Creative's X-Fi on Linux has been far from a pleasant experience, but today that may begin to change."