Xubuntu Hardy 8.04.1, Fuj:tech DVB-T USB-stick and how to install drivers

Ha!

Some gizmos acquired as birthday presents and one of them happens to be a Fuj:tech DTV PRO DVB-T USB stick.

Obviously, as with oh so many devices, the driver side was worrying me. Surprisingly I happened to be clever and checked before purchase that it would hopefully work with Linux. One witty Finnish guy has apparently been working on a driver with his friends for this particular DVB-T USB stick, which is using af9015 chip.

Getting the driver and compiling it was not too hard, even though you have to install mercurial. Mercurial in fact is a source control management system. Don’t bother your head too much with that, just keep reading to get the driver package to your pc..

Now, for the actual driver acquiring and compiling part.

Make sure you have build-essential, linux-headers and mercurial installed:
$ sudo aptitude install build-essential linux-headers-$(uname -r) mercurial

Then, get the driver (Note that the following command will create af9015 folder to the current folder where you are!):
$ hg clone http://linuxtv.org/hg/~anttip/af9015

Change directory to the af9015 folder:
$ cd af9015

And start compiling the driver, typing:
$ make

If all goes seemingly well, in other words no errors:
$ sudo make install

Then, you need to get firmware and place it to the /lib/firmware/$(uname -r) folder for the stick so that it can be detected and initialized correctly. First cd to the correct folder:
$ cd /lib/firmware/$(uname -r)

Then get the actual firmware:
$ sudo wget http://www.otit.fi/~crope/v4l-dvb/af9015/af9015_firmware

Note that you need to issue that wget command with sudo, as your normal account (hopefully) doesn’t have privileges to write files to the folder in question.

Now, put the stick to free USB socket and wait a bit. Then check that the driver is loaded:
$ lsmod | grep 9015

Output should show dvb_usb_af9015 at few different lines.

And just to be sure, check that there’s some content in /dev/dvb folder:
$ ls /dev/dvb

If the output of ls command is adapter0, your stick is correctly detected. If not, then you might have the usbhid module interfering the detection. Remove DVB stick from USB socket and unload usbhid module:
$ sudo rmmod usbhid

Now place the DVB stick again to one free USB socket and check again that do you have the dvb_usb_af9015 module loaded and some content in /dev/dvb/ folder.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get the IR remote to work “out of the box” and didn’t have enough time or motivation to fiddle around with it. At the end, I’m using the stick with Acer Aspire One (ZG5) or with some other laptop and I think I can switch channel and volume by hand..

After this, you need to work out channel configuration file or just start using the stick. depends on what program you are going to use.

I’ll work out the details of how to actually watch and record (read: use the stick) programs on a separate post. Just to annoy/simplify people/things.

I came across one page telling that when you compile the driver/module for af901x based dvb-t tuners you also break your uvcvideo device, for example usb webcam or Acer Aspire One (ZG5) builtin webcam. At first, this didn’t happen to my setup, but after having to compile the dvb-t stick driver/module again, it happened. When I figure this out, I’ll post a separate post of it with instructions how to get it fixed.

Tags: Debian, DVB, DVB-T, Fuj:tech, Fujitech, Kubuntu, Ubuntu, uvcvideo, Xubuntu