What distro? I have had my SB Live work fine with RH 7.3, RH 8, Debian Woody, Knoppix 3.1, and Xandros 1.0.

I've never had a problem with my sb live using any linux distro. In fact I think it's one of the best supported sound cards. Which module are you trying to load, hopefully you are trying the emu10k1 module and not something else.

yes it's emu10k1
 
My distro is a slackware with a 2.4.18 kernel.
 
I'll try to recompile my kernel with sb support, but i have no hope

Slackware is the most user unfriendly of all the distros, I have played with it from time to time, and it can be fustrating. I do know it will work in Slackware. You may have to either install it by doing what you were doing, rebuilding the kernel with the proper modules for the sound card, or you can also try downloading the Linux driver and compiling it. What version of Slackware are you using ? There should be a program with slackware you can run, something like a "sounddrake" in Mandrake, which should detect the sound card.

Ok but i don't want use progz from mandrake, it smell like ......
 
I have found why my sound card don't work, no irq was attribued to it.
 
do you know how activate irq sharing under linux ?????

modprobe emu10k1
 
Thats all you should need to do to get the SBLive! (at least the wave audio functions) working under Slackware 8.1 w/ kernel 2.4.18. I know it works because I'm using that exact distro right now and thats all I've ever had to do to get my SBLive working. If you want to make it work at startup edit rc.modules in /etc/rc.d and remove the comment ('#' mark) from the modprobe emu10k1 line in that file.

For SB Live to work with ALSA and MIDI, you can check out this article:
 
http://www.mandrakeusers.org/viewtopic.php?t=1189