30 channels, and still nothing worth watching
About October last year I bought my self a DVB card so I could watch the odd thing on TV. I spent some time researching the Linux compatibility of such things and settled on a Hauppauge NOVA-T PCI card, which several people had reported as supported. Frustratingly in there wisdom Hauppauge changed the chipset this card used shortly before I bought mine without telling anyone.
So I waited and shore enough a Linux driver was written for the new chipset, sadly the only kernel this was included in didn't boot on my system due to ACPI bugs. The ACPI bugs were soon fixed, but some bright spark had decided to rewrite large chunks of the DVB subsystem. Finally in 2.6.12 the card was back to being supported, so I with the lack of official Debian package of it, I tried to build my own, migrating my working 2.6.11 config. This didn't boot as the drivers for my SATA controller went loaded early enough.
*sigh*
So I waited for official packages of 2.6.12. This is slowed slightly by me completely missing that the 2.6.12 the packages go from being called kernel-image-blah to linux-image-blah (thanks to chckens for pointing this out), which for Debian as a multi kernel distribution makes a lot of sense. Hmm no support for this card from the Debian kernel image. I guess thats because the driver relays on a firmware blob of some sort, and such things are now not meant to be included in Debian. Which is great from a moral high ground sort of perspective but a royal pain in the ass if you happen to have hardware that relies on such things. Luckily those nice Ubuntu folks are not quite so insane about such things so I grabbed there 2.6.12 kernel, and Woo-Hoo! it works, with a few quick updates to ALSA packages I even have working sound to go with it.
After 9 months I now have it working properly in Linux, and no longer have to suffer theire truly awful windows software! Now I just need someone to write a Linux driver for my HP ScanJet 3670 and I will never have to brave Windows apart from to play the brilliant game that is Lego Star Wars
Note to hardware manufacturers, if you insist on changing the chip set in your hardware, please change the model number as well!
[ Entry posted at: Thu 28 Jul 2005 14:47:00 UTC | 3 comment(s)... | Cat: Geeky ]
Dave writes:
Lego Star Wars was incredibly frustrating, I couldn't get the hang of it at all. Damn console ports. :(
[ Fri 29 Jul 2005 13:18:31 UTC ]
Sitsofe writes:
Is Lego Star Wars as good as the say it is?
On another note, vendors are notorious for changing chipsets but not bothering to change model number. Witness the D-Link DWL-650 debacle which has been nearly every wifi chipset other than Broadcom. You have to look carefully at the packaging and hope with that one...
HP ScanJet 3670 - well you could try pressuring HP. They keep saying they are a good Linux citizen. The problem is no specs, so you are left having to reverse engineeer the Windows drivers using USB snooping software. Someone on the sane list can probably tell you what they need but it's going to be hard work.
Oh and what's that about your SATA drivers not being loaded early enough? Isn't that what initrd was invented for eh?
[ Thu 18 Aug 2005 07:21:17 UTC ]
Sitsofe writes:
You do know that dev null is a valid email address? AND checking MXs is annoying...
[ Thu 18 Aug 2005 07:21:58 UTC ]