When I was looking for a DVB-T USB tuner for my private laptop, I recalled the tough time we gave the Avermedia devices and how well they worked. Seemed to me, getting another Avermedia device was a great idea so long as there was Linux support. Avermedia claims Linux support for their AVerTV Volar HD Nano, but in truth I have wasted many hours configuring computers, installing kernel modules, and make installs. Admittedly, if I had've compiled the first driver and left the computer alone, it would still be working. Unfortunately, I made the decision to upgrade the Dell E6500 from 10.04LTS to 11.04, tried to get the HD Nano working. Then bought a new Dell E6320 and tried to get the thing to work on 11.04 on it. I am partly to blame for the hours I have spent, however, if Avermedia manufactured a device that was compliant with linux out of the box, I would still be a happy customer.
My last ditch effort with this thing was a virtual machine running windows. Using VirtualBox OSE on the E6500 running Ubuntu 10.04LTS, this worked fine. On the E6320 bleeding edge machine, which has hardware support problems on 10.04LTS, Ubuntu 11.04 is the first version of Ubuntu that works. VirtualBox OSE with windows XP or 7 installed can't handle the video no matter the amount of virtual resources I throw at it. So I was back to trying to install the HD Nano directly to Ubuntu. Hours pass, and the only thing I got was a headache.
New tactic. I thought about my hourly salary, and how many hours I was throwing at this problem over a few builds of Ubuntu, I compared my hourly loss of earnings to the cost of a Linux compliant device. Sadly, I could have bought a new device that worked out of the box many, many times over.
Asus My Cinema U3100 Mini - Linux compatibility out of the box
I wanted a good quality device, not something cheap and nasty. My research led me to the Asus My Cinema U3100 Mini. It's a nice little device with a LED indication it's running. Asus built these things to be compatible with their eeePC's, so they are Linux compliant out of the box. Simply install Kaffeine or Me TV, scan for channels, and you're away.
WARNING: The Asus My Cinema U3100 Mini is no longer available from Asus. There is a newer Asus U3100 Mini Plus, which is a black unit, has different markings, IR receiver and a remote. It is 'somewhat' Linux compatible, but not out of the box. Instructions can be found at linuxtv.org.
Asus U3100 Mini Plus - Requires some configuration
Kaffeine from the Ubuntu software center will be missing a dependency, and will give you a demux error; cannot find demux plugin for MRL. If you have the software center version, you can fix it in terminal with:
sudo apt-get install libxine1 libxine1-
Better yet, if you haven't installed Kaffeine yet, use the following command:
sudo apt-get install kaffeine libxine1 libxine1-
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