Maximum PC

I had a horrible time under Mandrake and Redhat getting my SB Live! and TNT2 card to be recognized with their full capabilities - IE installing drivers in linux.

Basically I want my cake and eat it too. What do I need to do get one, get the hardware up and running and two, to get games to play on it properly.

#1. For your TNT2 card, just download the nVidia Linux drivers. NVidia has now made it just about "dummy proof" to install their drivers in Linux, they provide the drivers as a script which you just run like so;

sh NVIDIA-1.04563.whateva.run

You'll find those here;

nVidia's Driver Location

#2. emu101k (sp?) drivers for the SB Live! cards have been out for quite some time now, I haven't had any problems getting mine to run on my server or my daughter's machine. Server runs Mdk 8.2, daughter runs Mdk 9.2. When I test-installed Red Hat 9 two weeks ago on another machine (w/SB Live!) it had it set-up and running ALSA OotB (Out of the Box). I started XMMS and it played fine and dandy. If you are talking about 4+ speaker support, I don't know about that, I've been using headphones on recent builds and kinda gotten away from speakers.............

#3. Go to Transgaming's website and download Cedega 4.1 or/and Point2Play (gui frontend and installer for Cedega) and install those. Cedega is the new name for WineX. I'm a beta-tester for Cedega/P2P, and I have to tell you, its working pretty well. The only game I can't get working properly is No One Lives Forever 2 and I'm almost there with that. Just about all the other games I own, I can play with minimal tweaking and just about OotB. Here's a short list;

City of Heroes (in fact, it runs so well, I can't tell the difference between Linux and WinXP)
SW: KotOR
Steam: Counter-Strike
Half-life
System Shock 2 (finally, yeah!)
Civilization III
Jedi Knight2: Outcast
Thief I & II
Diablo II
Morrowind
Dungeon Siege
Deus Ex (another one that runs so well I can't tell the difference)
Baldur's Gate I/II/all expansion packs (ditto above)
No One Lives Forever 2
Unreal II

There are also several games that support Linux natively, most notably, iD Software, the makers of Quake;

Quake II & III (note: I think Q3 looks and plays better in Linux than in windows )
Doom III
Unreal Tournament & 2003
NeverWinter Nights

You can also try Transgaming's Unofficial Wiki site for ideas to solve any problems you might have.

Just a note, with the TNT2, you will not be playing more recent 3D games, so don't get your hopes up.

First of all I love your avitar. Second I hate that saying, why would you want your cake, but not eat it?

This would be with my new rig, GeForce 6800 GT running Gentoo Linux. I'm using my SB Live! to wait until I can get an Audigy 2 ZS...the onboard 6.1 audio is nice, but I find a difference between it and even my SB Live! ...the Live! card is much better.

Linux is a love hate relationship with me. It loves to piss me off and I hate it for it. lol.

Honestly though, I wasn't as impressed with Redhat 8.0 and 9.0 as I was with Gentoo that my buddy is using. Portage is a great system.

I used to hate this saying as well, but it does make sense. If the cake has a pretty decoration or something, you're going to want to keep it. Now if you go and eat it, you can't keep it. Make sense? The saying is that you can't have your cake and eat it, not want it.

Wedding cake. Girls like to keep it in the freezer. The rest is as Gadget has said.

Funny, my wife ate our wedding cake that we had saved in the freezer.....came back from our honeymoon, and *poof*, two days later its gone

Then again, she was pregnant, that could explain it....