Creative releases a new v1.18 Beta driver for X-FI cards

Creative has received a lot of comments and rants (a lot of them well earned) from the Linux community for not supporting their X-FI cards on the GNU/Linux platform. Earlier, in august 2007, they did a release of a Beta driver, that seemed to leave a lot to wish for, even being a Beta driver. It was only released for 64 bit systems, and didn't work for a lot of users. You want proof? Just check the forums at Creative.

Now they've released a new Beta driver, even using the same version number. This was released for both 32 and 64 bit Linux, which at least caters to 50% of all the forum posts in their (very) lively forum.

The announcement can be found at:
http://forums.creative.com/creativelabs/board/message?board.id=soundblaster&message.id=123196#M123196

Let's hope this one is a bit better.

This might not be so much of an issue though, since the Open Source community has already been handed the specifications of the hardware, in this case the developers at ALSA and OSS.

http://4front-tech.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=7485#7485
http://mailman.alsa-project.org/pipermail/alsa-devel/2008-March/006566.html

Let's see who creates something functional and stable first, let the best man win!