Linux woes...

Okay, so I did something kind of dumb. I decided to give that OSx86 install everyone is doing a whirl on my HP laptop. To make a long story short, that didn’t work, and obviously I completely hosed the hard drive in the process. So, rather than immediately re-installing WinXP, since I don’t normally use this laptop except when playing live, I thought I’d give Linux a whirl, and see what the Linux music scene is doing lately.

So, after searching about a bit, I settled on the Xandros distribution. Downloaded it, and installed. Completely painless, and quite frankly a bit easier than installing WinXP or OSX on their respective platforms.

However, I’ve hit a brick wall. I want to use my emagic EMI 2|6 box with this computer. Apparently, the driver for this box is built-in to current kernels of Linux, but I can’t for the life of me get it to work. Every page I find with a hint of “instruction,” (and I use that term loosely in this context) is something on the order of this. Let me just say that shit like this is why Linux will never replace Windows as the desktop OS of choice. If you just want to surf and check your e-mail, it’s fine, and even better than fine, because it is more or less completely unsucceptable to virii and such. But if you want to do _anything_ beyond the simplest tasks, it becomes a hair-pulling experience.

So, my question is thus: if _anyone_ that is reading this has managed to get the ESI 2|6 (or 6|2, for that matter) to work with Linux, and can give me clear, concise instruction for doing the same, I’d love to hear about it.