The Sound Blaster X-Fi sound card driver for Linux from Creative Labs was awful. That's simply the nicest way to put it. The driver was home to many bugs, initially only supported 64-bit Linux, and it was arriving extremely late. The open-source drivers supporting the Creative X-Fi drivers have also been at a stand still. However, Creative Labs today has finally turned this situation around and they have open-sourced the code to this notorious driver. The source-code for the Creative X-Fi driver is now licensed under the GNU GPLv2.

Back in June of 2006, Creative Labs has shared they were working on X-Fi Linux support and expected to release the driver for it in the second quarter of 2007. While it was almost a year out at that time, Creative promised full ALSA support and OpenAL 1.1 support with EAX (Environmental Audio Extensions). In May of 2007, Creative Labs then admitted they duped Linux for Microsoft Vista. Rewriting their Windows drivers to support the Microsoft Vista operating system had taken more time and resources than expected, so they had postponed their Linux work as a result.

In September of 2007, which was two years after the Sound Blaster X-Fi family was originally introduced, Creative Labs finally delivered a Linux driver. This driver was binary-only and it only supported 64-bit Linux. Some manufacturers will just push out 32-bit drivers, but with this first Creative had instead just published a 64-bit driver. This driver also required an older version of GCC and hadn't worked nicely with Ubuntu and other Linux distributions of the time.

You can read the entire article at Phoronix.