The Hauppauge Nova-T-Lite is a low budget DVB-T USB 2.0 Stick and comes complete with a passive antenna. Here in Germany you can get it for ~20€. It doesn't have an internal MPEG2 decoder, but this is completly fine, since even ancient CPUs can decode MPEG2 in software. It also includes a working IR receiver which can be used to read signals from some remote controls (even if the package doesn't include one). It seemed to be compatible with my RC5 remote, but I didn't go into IR support further, since I already have a working homebrew serial IR receiver.

My first straight forward attempt was to make menuconfig with the gentoo-sources 2.6.25 kernel and select the according driver. This is the DibCom 0700 driver called dib-usb-0700. After that an additional firmware is needed, which I thought the package manager would provide (DVB_CARDS="usb-dib0700" emerge -av media-tv/linuxtv-dvb-firmware).But the version numbers were slightly of, so a created a symlink with the correct name to the installed firmware image (may have been a mistake).

Everything compiled I rebooted, the driver and the firmware got loaded successfully and I started a channel scan (w_scan). But I just got no channels. Well, this could be a problem of bad receiver signals which would have been very bad. Berlin Lichtenberg is know for it's bad FM behaviour (architectural reasons) but I didn't know this was true for DVB-T, too.

So, a look into dmesg and syslog showed some sort of I2C errors... At first I didn't take them too serious, but they correlated with scanning retries. So I read the linuxtv wiki page more carefully. And right at the top it said I should install bleeding edge v4l drivers. Gaaaaaaah! Abandoning your package manager is a bad thing to do to your system --there is no make uninstall. But Gentoo provides an ebuild for that :) "emerge -av media-tv/v4l-dvb-hg" provides you with a checkout from their sources. Bad thing is, there was a syntax error in one of the v4l drivers so the package wouldn't compile :(

The solution I came up was then to manually get the Mercurial checkout, make menuconfig on these sources and exclude everything I didn't need, compile with make and then make install and modprobe the modules. Bad thing to do ... but well ... it worked after all. Next thing to do was to get a recent firmware. Seems like the gentoo firmware package is heavily outdated. The new firmware (you can find the link in the linuxtv wiki) even had the correct filename for the kernel driver.

So after this procedure the I2C error messages were gone and it finally worked.

But ... someone really has to update the gentoo packages and add a way to do a make menuconfig for the v4l-dvb-hg sources before they get buildt. I think I'll open some bugs...