[Lancaster] Help needed with Anaogue/Digital TV/Radio Card under Linux

[Ken Hough]

Hi Guys!

Two things:

First, some feedback relating to my new desktop PC. I bought this from Mesh 
Computers. The basic spec is:

Model  -- Elite Pro 8200T
Processor  -- Intel Core 2 Quad Q8200 2.33GHz
RAM           -- 4GB, for now, but maximum allowed is 8GB
Graphics  --  nVidia GeForce 9500GT   (OK as I'm not a serious games freak)
Motherboard -- ASUS P5K SE

The machine came with 64 bit Windows Vista Home Premium pre-installed. I had 
no choice with this. Despite this being quite a fast machine, Vista runs as 
if it is immersed in treacle! Unbelievably SLOW! I cannot begin to 
understand, how Microsoft could have expected this to take off.

The Vista desktop includes an annoying amount of useless eye candy and message 
ballons keep popping up as if the machine had a mind of it's own.

The hard drive is 750GB SATA, so I decided to use the Vista disc management 
tools to 'shrink' the Vista partition, so as to have lots of space for Linux. 
Despite Vista occupying only 36GB or so, I was not allowed to shrink this 
partiton to less than 363GB !!!! And yes! I did defrag Vista first!

I then tried using 'gparted' (which does understand NTFS) in 'SystemRescueCD 
v1.1.0' to shrink the partition further, but this complained that there was 
an error on the partition. Funny? VIsta checked it and found it to be OK. Is 
this yet another case of Microsoft playing at silly b*****s?

There was another primary partition of approx 23GB which I guess is some sort 
of Vista backup. So with Vista present, just over half of the hard drive is 
not available for other use, and only 2 other main partitions can be created.

Using 'gparted', I was able to set up 1 more primary partiton to serve as a 
boot partition for Linux, and an extended partition to hold the rest of a 
Linux system.

I've installed 64 bit SUSE v11.0. This is impressive!!! And on the quad core 
processor, is fast! SUSE v11.0 is very professionally turned out, and without 
too much useles eye candy. From the installation menu, there's a choice of 
installing gnome, KDE v 4, KDE v3.5, and 'others'. I opted for the stable KDE 
v3.5.

As usual with SUSE, installation was a doddle, and impressively quick. The 
installed system boots in under 30 seconds and after entering a password, the 
KDE desktop appears in 5 to 8 seconds. Even Open Office takes only a few 
seconds to run up! This is a stark contrast to Vista which takes over 1 1/2 
minutes to get to the login screen and then another 30 seconds or so to run 
up the desktop.

I'm in two minds as to whether to keep Vista to demonstrate how bad it is, or 
to wipe it off the drive and make better use of the space.

The PC motherboard includes a parallel ATA socket as well as four series ATA 
sockets, plus an external SATA socket, so there's plenty of scope for 
expansion.

Anyway, on to my second point:

This PC includes a PCI digital/analogue TV/FM Radio card (a KWorld DVB-T 210), 
which I've proved to work under Vista. There is some info on the Internet to 
the effect that this card has been made to work under Linux (Ubuntu and 
SUSE), but this is not an area where I really know what I'm doing. I know 
that when the appropriate modules are loaded (saa7134 and saa7134_dvb) it's 
necessary to specify parameters such as 'card=xx' and 'tuner=xx', but am 
floundering as to how to do the job properly. 

Does anyone know how to do this, or can point me towards clear information as 
to how to do this?

Ken Hough