Installing the latest V4L TV tuner drivers for Fedora 8

Bill Giannikos

This guide will help you install the latest development V4L TV tuner drivers under Fedora 8. Fedora already includes a older driver set with its kernel however you may need to update to the latest version for (better) support for your TV tuner card.

While this guide is mainly focused to laptop users there isn't any difference for desktop users.

This guide installs the “up to the minute” development drivers. These drivers have not been fully tested yet so may cause unexpected results in some cases.

You should run a full update for your installation of Fedora to ensure you have all the latest packages installed.

Here are the steps involved for installing the V4L drivers.

1. Load up a terminal window if you are in the graphic interface.

2. Switch to the root user by entering the command “su -” (without the quotes) and typing in your root password.

3. Type in the following to install gcc, mercurial and the kernel headers:

yum install gcc kernel-devel mercurial

4. Move to the /usr/src/ folder with:

cd /usr/src

5. Download the latest drivers with:

hg clone http://linuxtv.org/hg/v4l-dvb

6. Move into the newly created folder with

cd v4l-dvb

7. Now start the building process with:

make

This will take a while.

8. And finally install these drivers with:

make install

9. Reboot your computer and the newer V4L drivers will be used.