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Page Contents Author Introduction Notes Prerequisites Installing the latest development V4L driver

Author

Bill Giannikos (bill2 at giannikos.com.au)
www.billgiannikos.com

Introduction

While Ubuntu 7.10 already includes a version of the V4L driver drivers, these drivers are under constant development and your TV Tuner card may require a later version than the one included in Ubuntu. Here we will guide you in the necessary steps in installing the latest developmental V4L drivers.

Notes

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.

Prerequisites

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

Installing the latest development V4L driver

Here are the steps in installing the latest V4L drivers.

1. Load up a terminal window if you are in the graphic interface.
2. Type in the following to install gcc, mercurial and the kernel headers:

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

4. Download the latest V4L drivers with:

5. Move into the newly created folder with

6. Now start the building process with:

This will take a while.

7. And finally we install these drivers with:

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