The soundblaster was plugged in to usb while Knoppix loaded and the blue light came on. Once K loaded I opened an mp3 with xmss but it wouldnt play so with it still loaded I ran soundconfig still nothing so I opened Kaffeine dragged the file in and it played thru the soundblaster, beautifully! While knoppix was loading I got sound thru the laptop speakers. While Kaffeine was playing thru the soundblaster xmss could also play thru the speakers. A 24 bit file would play in Kaffeine with a lot of static noise and a 1696wav would play for about 20 seconds before cutting out. The laptop has a dual amd turion64, 512mb ram. The sound of Nadia Salero Sonnenberg on the mp3 was incredibly beautiful.