I think I have your answer. The Dell Sound blaster card is not a sound blaster. it uses a diffrent chipset (emu10kx) that only dell wrote drivers for. you can see if you can find drivers on teh dell site but most sites I searched for this problem says that dell had Creative labs make this chip for them and they did not make Linux drivers.
below are some quotes from suport sites
http://opensource.creative.com /:
"The Dell CT0200 -- The new Live 5,1 card from Dell (CT0200) is not
based on the EMU10K1 chip, under the EMU10K1 to driver available AT
SourceForge won't work with it."
AFAIK, the only way to make this card produces sound on Linux is to
buy the BETA binary-only drivers from 4Front AT to mere U.S. $35 to per
seat (and Ím stuck with 40 of these that I really needed
sound support on)...
hope this helps. The only segestion I have is write dell and tell tem to suport the card for linux (since they aer a red hat partner and mandrake is is red hat with some tweaking) or buy a real SBlive card...
sorry I could be more helpful (I have a SBlive from a dell but aperiently it's before dell changed chipsets but it did come eith the PIII 500 some one traded me for labor
Willaim S. Huskey
Network Engineer
SAIC
"there are 10 types of people in this world. They who understand binary and they who do not"