Silencing kit for Silverstone Grandia HTPC case

http://pages.ebay.com/link/?nav=item.view&id=121359887181&alt=web

Cheap XBMC remote control

The Telegraph: KAZAM releases phones for under £40. http://google.com/newsstand/s/CBIww7b1nB8

The Trooper X 3.5 retailing at £39.95 could make an ideal XBMC remote control once Yatse is installed. Especially if it could be placed on a charging dock overnight.

TBS6285 Part 2

Following on from my previous post http://ubuntulinuxhtpc.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/tbs6285.html I've received the quad-tuner and installed it, having overcome a few hurdles. I've described the process I followed, below. If you can't get this card to work, feel free to get in touch, and I should be able to help you get up and running.

The first hurdle to overcome was installation of the linux drivers for the TBS6285. These can be downloaded from http://www.tbsdtv.com/download/. After help from Constantine, developer at Turbosight (TBS), it turned out that my motherboard (MSI 990FXA-GD65) is one of many faulty ones floating around (there is a buggy ASM1083 chip soldered between PCIe and PCI bus) which cannot handle IRQ from the card and causes an interrupt storm from the card. To overcome that I did the following (from http://www.tbsdtv.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=52&t=7631#p24903):

1. Create a .conf file 

sudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/tbs.conf

2. Edit contents of .conf file by inserting the following two lines and saving file

options saa716x_tbs-dvb int_type=1

options saa716x_tbs-dvb enable_ir=0 

The first line activates MSI (Message Signal Interrupts) instead of the older IRQ. The second disables remote control receiver on the card to make sure the interrupt storm is not coming from there).

3. Reboot to load the driver with MSI loaded.

Then, following intructions from http://www.linuxtv.org/wiki/index.php/TBS6285#Making_it_Work and http://www.linuxtv.org/wiki/index.php/TBS6284 with a few amendments for TBS6285 and some permissions problems, I managed to get the card working. These are the commands I used:

1. Extract the ZIP file tbs-linux-drivers_v[VERSION NUMBER].zip. As of 25 April 2014, the latest version is 140425.

unp -u tbs-linux-drivers_v140425.zip

2. Extract linux-tbs-drivers.tar.bz2 archive

cd tbs-linux-drivers_v140425 

unp linux-tbs-drivers.tar.bz2

3. Change ownership and permissions of extracted files

sudo chown -R <yourusername> tbs-linux-drivers_v140425

sudo chmod -R 777 tbs-linux-drivers_v140425 

4. Change to driver package directory

cd tbs-linux-drivers_v140425

cd linux-tbs-drivers

4.1 (If on fresh install on CentOS or similar)     

yum install kernel-devel-`uname -r`

cd linux-tbs-drivers

make clean

make distclean

 (move to Step 5)

  
5. Select platform architecture
(for any x86_64 kernel only)

enter into a terminal: 

./v4l/tbs-dvbc-x86_64.sh

and then:

./v4l/tbs-x86_64.sh

6. Build the driver. Recompiles v4l for a wide range of cards, around 500, will take many minutes.

make

        (I modify this to make -j7  to use all 6 cores of my CPU)

7. Install driver

sudo make install

8. Reboot, then
(Ubuntu-based distros only. See http://www.linuxtv.org/wiki/index.php/TBS6285#Making_it_Work for other distros)

sudo rm -Rf /lib/modules/<your kernel version>/kernel/drivers/media

9. Reinstall drivers

cd tbs-linux-drivers_v140425 

cd linux-tbs-drivers 

sudo make install

10. Load newly installed driver

sudo modprobe -v tbs62x0fe

insmod /lib/modules/3.(your kernel version)-generic/kernel/drivers/media/dvb/frontends/tbs62x0fe.ko

11. Check it loaded correctly

Reboot:

sudo shutdown -r now

After rebooting and logging back in, check to see if dvb adaptor nodes now exist:

ls -al /dev/dvb

You should see something similar to the following displayed in your terminal:

drwxr-xr-x  2 root root  120 Jul  9 21:12 adapter0

drwxr-xr-x  2 root root  120 Jul  9 21:12 adapter1

drwxr-xr-x  2 root root  120 Jul  9 21:12 adapter2

drwxr-xr-x  2 root root  120 Jul  9 21:12 adapter3

This should give you a correctly installed TBS6285 on Ubuntu 14.04 (after trials and tribulations, it did for me!)