I’ve been using a Hauppauge NOVA-S-Plus DVB-S card for a while now with MythTV running on Ubuntu Hardy.

I recently upgraded to Lucid and had lots of difficulty getting the card to work with MythTV. All of the required kernel modules were loaded as expected (cx88xx, etc) and the device tree showed up as expected:

ls -l /dev/dvb/adapter0
total 0
crw-rw---- 1 root video 212, 1 2010-10-12 23:07 demux0
crw-rw---- 1 root video 212, 2 2010-10-12 23:07 dvr0
crw-rw---- 1 root video 212, 0 2010-10-12 23:07 frontend0
crw-rw---- 1 root video 212, 3 2010-10-12 23:07 net0

Testing dvbtune gave the following message:

dvbtune -f 1159000 -p H -s 22500000
FD 7: fd_dvr DEMUX DEVICE: : Device or resource busy

It turns out the fix is actually very simple, it’s just not very obvious or well advertised:

sudo apt-get install linux-firmware-nonfree

Apparently the firmware blobs have some legal restrictions regarding their distribution so they have been placed into a separate package as of Karmic.

Make sure you reboot after installing the firmware package.