About a year ago I got a good deal on an ATI TV Wonder 600 USB TV Tuner ($20 of woot.com), which I was pretty excited about. I tore open the package and plugged it into my newly installed Windows 7 system, which I had just installed and was happy with. I’m usually a Linux fanboy, but this time Windows felt different. Everything worked great out of the box, and it even connected to the internet and downloaded drivers for me. I was almost a complete convert, and this would seal the deal. Sadly, this would not be the case.
My first problem was with the errors Windows 7’s driver download function gave me, which were something to the effect of: “There are no drivers available, and the vendor (ATI) does not intend to release any for Windows 7”. FU$@#!@. This would have been nice to know, especially considering the fact that there are drivers for Vista, but not for Windows 7.
So instead, I decided to install it in Fedora 14. This was not a simple process, either, but it was far more fruitful than the Windows experience was.
Initially I thought it would be as simple as typing in a “yum install me-tv”, which others on forum posts had claimed gotten the adapter to work. After 30 minutes of frustration, I gave up. Today, though, I found another how-to here.
Specifically, the portion about downloading the firmware is what did it for me:
Firmware
In order to use the LinuxTV driver, you need to download and install the firmware. Here is the procedure to follow:
Download the firmware with something like:
wget http://steventoth.net/linux/hvr1400/xc3028L-v36.fw
copy the file so it can be picked up by the Linux kernel:
cp xc3028L-v36.fw /lib/firmware
First, switch to the root user:
su -
cd /lib/firmware
wget http://steventoth.net/linux/hvr1400/xc3028L-v36.fw
Then reboot with your favorite reboot command. If you’re logged in graphically in KDE, select “Leave”, then reboot. I was SSH’ed in from my Windows 7 box so I just typed an “init 6”. Avoid the reboot command if you can, as it does not shut down cleanly and can cause issues on future reboots.
After that, I fired up the me-tv program and it detected my card! Sweet! Ran a scan and saw channels show up, looks like all is well.
