There is a nice howto at http://firedtv.bbackx.com/?q=node/2. Also, you might want to check out my latest patches for enabling the demux traffic and the Common Interface. Take a look at http://firesat.kurelid.se/.

Happy TV!

It took a while, but the Linux kernel driver for FireDTV and FloppyDTV - known as firedtv, formerly known as firesat - has now been merged into Linus' kernel source repository. The first release candidate to include firedtv will be kernel 2.6.29-rc7.

If you build your kernels from source, you find the driver option in the menu "Device Drivers"/ "Multimedia devices"/ "DVB/ATSC adapters"/ "FireDTV and FloppyDTV". None of the other options in the DVB menu are required for the driver, besides "DVB for Linux" in "Multimedia devices".

In this release, the driver requires the ieee1394 and ohci1394 as middle-men to the FireWire bus. (Kernel configuration menu in 2.6.29: "Device Drivers"/ "IEEE 1394 (FireWire) support"/ "Stable FireWire stack" and "OHCI-1394 controllers".) If all goes as planned, firedtv will in also be able to work through the newer firewire-core and firewire-ohci drivers too in kernel 2.6.30.

Great news!!!

Correction: The latter step has been completed only recently and was merged into mainline kernel 2.6.33-rc1, i.e. will be released early next year in kernel 2.6.33. Those who compile their own kernel can now select either

• FireWire driver stack (FIREWIRE)
  
  • OHCI-1394 controllers (FIREWIRE_OHCI)

or

• Legacy alternative FireWire driver stack (IEEE1394)
  
  • OHCI-1394 controllers (IEEE1394_OHCI1394)

or all of these options, and subsequently

• Multimedia support (MEDIA_SUPPORT)
  
  • DVB/ATSC adapters (DVB_CAPTURE_DRIVERS)
    
    • FireDTV and FloppyDTV (DVB_FIREDTV)

to enable the firedtv driver in the kernel configurator.

For users or Linux distributor kernels, this update simply means that the FireDTV/ FloppyDTV driver will be available regardless of the distributor's choice of underlying 1394 kernel driver stack. In distributions based on kernel 2.6.29...2.6.32, the driver is only available if the distributor chose the older stack (ieee1394), which was true so far on almost all distributions.