Creative X-Fi drivers finally out (again)

I've just set up Gentoo on my desktop computer just to find that my super-advanced Creative X-Fi soundcard would just not work. The story seems quite strange. Once upon a time Creative open-sourced the driver but then abandoned it. One can still find tutorials on how to get that artifact running. However I could not get it compiled against my linux-2.6.28-gentoo-r5 kernel.

So I've set a google alert on X-Fi and linux and went to look for a trusty AC97-card...

Well... Takashi Iwai saved the day. See his post on the alsa list.
The next Kernel might very well contain the snd_ctxfi-module :)

The story ends happy. If you want to use the thing now here's what needs to be done:

• get the tarball alsa-driver-unstable linked in Takashi's post
• get a recent kernel, I had to unmask linux-2.6.29-gentoo-r4 to get it compiled. Enable sound support but do not include alsa or oss
  
• (re-compile nvidia-modules *grrrrr*)
• untar alsa-driver-unstable and consult INSTALL in the folder, in short:

• ./configure --with-isapnp=no --with-oss=no --with-cards=ctxfi
  
• make
• make install
• ./snddevices (inserts /dev/dsp - make sure your user is in the audio-group)