Hauppage Nova-T PCI DVB receiver card fine in 2.6.8, broken in 2.6.16
I have a similar problem to some earlier posters. I will describe it to
you, but first I must vent.
GAAAAAAAH!
I have been running my little old WinTV Nova-T PCI quite happily for 3
years in a RedHat 8 box. When I say old, I mean _old_. It's got the
Grundig front end and the SAA7146 chipset. I had some teething problems
getting the DVB drivers compiled, back in the 2.4.22 days before they
were in the kernel, but after that it was totally reliable. I once
recorded 14 hours of unbroken TV.
This year, I upgraded to Debian Sarge with a 2.6.8 kernel. After some
voodoo, I finally got the DVB working again. Sparing the gore, the key
points were:
a) use Sarge, not Etch
b) modprobe the grundig_29504-401 driver in /etc/init.d/dvb
c) manually mknod the device nodes for /dev/dvb/adapter0 (remembering to
use major device number 212)
d) build the latest dvbstream from CVS
e) personally bite the head off the chicken - the meat cleaver is not enough
But, my USB webcam still didn't work (another story) so I did a
dist-upgrade to Etch. That gave me Etch stuff with a 2.6.8 kernel. DVB
still working at this point.
Then I apt-get install linux-2.6.16 and get a new kernel. The
installation process tells me to purge hotplug, so I dpkg --purge hotplug.
Now DVB is totally broken. The system populates the /dev/dvb tree with
what _looks_ like the correct devices, but dvbstream responds with "bad
file descriptor" for the frontend - cat'ing the dev files shows that
they really do not exist.
I had been blaming this problem on the change from grundig_29504-401 to
L64781, but I don't think this is it. It's something to do with
removing hotplug and putting in udev, because when I apt-get install
hotplug, it all works again.
After about 50 hours on this, I'm totally at a loss. I'm resigned to
only ever having a 2.6.8 kernel. I'm also considering quitting
computing for a gardening job. Please, please would someone who knows
about hotplug, udev and DVB drivers tell me the stupid thing I'm doing
wrong?
Regards,
Steve Duncan
-- Come, bring forth this offending module
William Shakespeare
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