Benjamin Niemann

'apt-get install new-hardware' vs. 'plug & pray'

Today we received the satellite dish and a DVB-S card that we ordered. Althought we will only use it under Linux, I once again made the mistake to try the installation under Windows first - for some strange reason even I still believe that such things are easier under Windows...

And once again I was wrong.

Ok, the most interesting part was totally OS-independent: climbing onto the roof to attach the satellite dish. I am still alive, no broken bones, go on to the next phase.

Install the PCI card: no big deal thanks to my fine Dell computer - not a single screw to drive. Clip here, clap there and done.

And finally install the drivers and software: as I said, I tried it first under Windows - but I'll leave this story for the punchline.

After giving up on the Windows installation, I boot Linux. I checked for driver support before I ordered the card and found several forum post with descriptions, so I knew which modules I have to load. Just for fun I did a 'lsmod', just to see that everything is already loaded. Shit. I don't even have to compile a new kernel. Obviously the hotplug package, that I installed a week ago to get a USB scanner working, took care of it.

And some software for TV watching - I decided to give Kaffeine a try: 'apt-get install kaffeine'. On startup it detected the DVB card, I just had to select the correct satellite from a drop down, scan for available channels and done.

Welcome to the wonderland of television.

Now back to the Windows installation: in fact it was rather boring. I selected Windows in my boot manager and went into the kitchen to make a cup of tea. When I returned, I had a beautiful black screen with a few flickering pixels - Windows simply crashed during startup. Ok, no TV watching under Windows. In fact no Windows at all...

I suspect that the problem is caused by some resource/interrupt/... conflict. Something that Linux is too stupid to even notice. Perhaps I could fix it, if I put the card in another PCI slot. Perhaps formatting the Windows partition with ReiserFS to use it for HD recording is easier...

That was not the first time I made this experience. Two or three years ago I bought a cheap NVIDIA graphics cards to replace the crappy onboard chip on our previous computer. I installed it, booted Windows and installed the driver from CD. Windows crashed. Boot in safe mode and reinstall the plain VGA driver. Reboot. Download the latest driver, tried again. Boom. After some more cycles I gave up and booted Linux.

I downloaded the Linux driver, compiled some modules (yeah, that's how Linux has to be - nothing for the chicken hearted) and did a 'modprobe forgot-how-the-module-was-called'. Well, it failed to load. But it did not crash my OS. Instead it told me that probably some weird BIOS setting caused the problem and what I had to dis-/enable. I rebooted (one of the few occasions that you have to reboot Linux...), did as I was told and voilà: the module loaded, some tweaks to the X config and I had accelerated OpenGL under Linux.

And it worked under Windows, too.