CREATIVE SOFTWARE IS THE SHITTIEST SHIT I’VE EVER HAD THE DISPLEASURE OF DEALING WITH.

Seeing as I’ve re-installed Windows (see previous post), I’ve needed to re-install all my drivers. This has been relatively easy, as everything on my motherboard is taken care of by a single installer from nVidia, and my video card is taken care of by another single installer file, both of which are easily accessible from the nVidia website.

However, Creative on the other hand don’t make things so easy. I have the pleasure of owning a Creative Sound Blaster Live! OEM, a sound card that apparently doesn’t exist in any driver package that Creative distributes from their website. Even though when I input the model number, SB0220, it tells me what my card is, and what driver I need, when I download the driver and try to run it, I get an error message saying something along the lines of:

Setup could not detect any Sound Blaster Audio card on your system.

Please ensure that your Sound Blaster hardware is properly installed before running this Setup program.

Setup will now exit.

Not only that, but using Creative’s autoupdate site is about as much help. None. It detects that I have a Sound Blaster Live! 5.1 card, lists the driver version as being very old, and promptly informs me that no software updates are necessary because I already have the latest version.

A big FUCK YOU to Creative, who DO NOT supply software for this sound card. Sure, it’s old, and sure, it costs $35 for me to go out and buy a NEW Sound Blaster Live! that does the exact same job, but how about I don’t simply because I SHOULDN’T FUCKING HAVE TO! AND FUCKING CREATIVE SHOULD SUPPLY THE PROPER FUCKING DRIVERS!

The driver version I managed to install from DriverGuide.com is 5.12.01.0252; this version is too old for me to install the Creative Play Center so I can configure my speakers properly. However, when I try to install any of the driver update packs, they all tell me that I don’t have any Creative Sound Blaster cards installed. At all.

Yet, I somehow managed to install some version of the drivers, those being a hackjob set I found on DriverGuide.com. I think they’re taken from the original installation media, but I can’t be sure. They do give me sound, but it’s pretty shitty. I bet ten bucks that I can’t get 3D or any kind of surround working, but I’ll see soon, when I install Counter-Strike later.

Update:

Wow! OMG! I found some drivers that have allowed me to update the version to 5.12.1.0290, the version that the latest driver patch says the drivers need to be before it works, however, guess what? NONE OF THE SOFTWARE I’VE DOWNLOADED FROM THE CREATIVE WEBSITE CAN DETECT THAT I HAVE A CREATIVE SOUND CARD INSTALLED! EVEN WITH THESE “UPDATED” DRIVERS THAT I’VE FOUND! HOLY FUCKING SHIT! I HATE YOU CREATIVE!

Update Two:

FINALLY I GOT IT WORKING! I was able to download an ISO of the original installation media for the SB0228 and SB0229 cards, slightly different from my SB0220, but IT WORKED! And it was all possible due to the dedication of the users over at the Creative forums and this thread in particular, where you will find a link to this site where you will find the original installation CDs for the Sound Blaster Live! and various other Creative products. So hopefully this rant of mine can help others in future who are having trouble installing their old Creative sound cards!

I’ll just put a few keywords here for Google: sound blaster live install driver oem original media trouble error

I’m posting this from Firefox 2 in Arch Linux!

Yay!

And I appear to have come through the transition with all my data in tact! Really, the only thing I wanted to keep hold of was my music, my episodes of Top Gear, and my e-mail, so I’ve managed to cover those three bases (and more), apparently.

The Arch install wasn’t very difficult at all, though Tate helped me a lot, and without his assistance I’d probably still be sitting at an Arch install dialogue wondering what the hell I’m doing. :-D

So far, I’ve install xorg, gdm, gnome, gnome-extra, and all the other stuff I need to make life a little easier. Though, as I’m going along I’m finding new things that I’ve forgotten to install that an install of Ubuntu would’ve remembered for me, like audio and video codecs and such. However, pacman, Arch’s package manager, is absolutely GREAT. When I installed Quod Libet (sorry Tate, mpd doesn’t appear to have a last.fm plugin), it automatically installed the gstreamer plugins (to decode mp3 and Ogg-Vorbis) for me as well. Something strange I’ve found is that Arch does not come with an ssh client in the base package; I thought that would’ve been pertinent to include, after all, it’s only an extra few hundred kilobytes.

I still have a few niggles, such as:

• My fonts are a bit wierd. I don’t seem to have the range of fonts that I did with Ubuntu, and some websites look dodgy.
• My fonts in Firefox aren’t anti-aliased
• I need to install some themes to get rid of the uglyness that is default GNOME
• The gdm login screen is crap. I want it to look like Ubuntu/XP and be a nice pretty thing with a single text input box, not something that looks like it came from the 90’s and Windows NT
• My volume is always muted on startup
• I have to sort through my three hard drives and remove all my duplicate files and clean everything up (this is hardly Arch’s fault, but, it’s still a niggle)

So hopefully when Tate wakes up, he might be able to help me out a bit more. Otherwise I’m going to have to search the Arch forums and Wiki (which are pretty good, IMO) for solutions.

Also, I hate installing XP, it took longer to install XP than it did for me to setup Arch, and I’ve never installed Arch before. Go figure. Also, Creative drivers for their SoundBlaster Live cards SUCK DICK, mainly because no matter what driver I download, it ALWAYS gives me an error saying “cannot detect an SB Live card installed, are you sure you have the right driver?” … no matter what driver.