Well thanks.. I would certainly appreciate any help anyone can offer. Yes I would have to say I agree with you on the Red Hat thing, although I was anxious not to piss off a lot of Red Hat users, particularly as this set up did work for sound in Red Hat. But I just couldn't cope with the dependency hell of Red Hat or any other RPM based distribution, so I started looking for an easy to manage distribution that would let me install and unistall software and updates without any of that hassle. Gentoo portage was that magic formula and after using it for a short while I was permenantly won over. It is a little ironic maybe that the easiest to use package management system in the Linux world comes included in the hardest to install linux distribution in the Linux world. (Slackware is nothing compared to Gentoo...) But oh well there you are. The end result is certainly worthwhile. It may have taken me a while to get my head around it, but persistance pays dividends and I came out of it knowing a lot more about Linux than I could have learned any other way. But as I said, I have never had sound and full 3D video working in any distibution I have tried (which is about eitht I think). right now I have every other feature working sweetly - except sound... If I could have sound I think I would celebrate by wiping all my windows partitions and instantly switching my 460GB of music, movies and games over to ext3 partitions. I want to be done with Windows and MS by this years end. Having sound would be a big step towards this goal. Q PS As for SPDIF cable. That isn't really an issue. I have high quality optical cable, which although in terms of benefit is probably only of at best an aesthetic value, at least gurantees a clear signal. (I assume you know that difference between optical and coaxil digital out is virtually irrelevant? In other words, it doesn't matter which of these is connected to the SPDIF out). Again any input anyone can offer on this would be much appreciated. It would for me be the culmination of a long held goal now (of over a year) to have both sound and video fully working in Linux. Q dwillis@xxxxxxxxxx wrote: >On Wed, 8 Oct 2003, Q wrote: > > > >>As for installing Red Hat, well I am a Gentoo Linux user... For better >>or for worse that is what I am... It has taken me 4 months to get Gentoo >>set up (its only rival in terms of difficulty to install is I think >>Linux from Scratch) and after having gotten everything else working, I'm >>not in the mood to give up now. >> >> > >four months? i discovered gentoo september 19 and have everything that >i need set up now (and today i discovered i can use cooledit96 under >wine!). redhat sucks. suse is great for easy use. > >anyway, i've got the same audio chipset, as well as an audiophile 2496, >but my motherboard (kt400-alh) has analog 5.1 output, no digital. i can >try to see if that option works under linux, thoough, if you think it will >help you. > >also, make sure you are using a proper spdif cable (75 ohm, i think), and >not just any rca cable as it won't work. i wish i could find one of those >here in korea. > >ffiw, >dave > > > > >