I have been trying to get my "Leadtek WinFast DTV1000 T" TV tuner card to work in MythTV using FC4. I have very little Linux experience, and I am finding it much more difficult than I expected.

After some excessive goggleing, I have read several reports of other people who managed to get the same card working under Linux, but they have all reported that kernel version 2.6.15-rc1 was the first version to support this particular card.

Unfortunately, yum does not update to such a recent (potentially unstable?) version of the kernel. I tried compiling my own, but I found the process very confusing. I have since downloaded an RPM containing kernel version 2.6.15-1 from the Fedora Core website which was marked 'testing'.

The kernel seems fairly stable, but MythTV still doesn't seem to be able to detect my TV Tuner card (or more than likely I am making a mistake somewhere). I am not even sure if the card is being detected by the OS.

The card has two large ICs marked:
Conexant
DVB-T 2K/8K
CX22702-15
...
and
Conexant
Broadcast Decoder
CX23883-19
...

I have also included my lspci output:
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation 82865G/PE/P DRAM Controller/Host-Hub Interface (rev 02)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82865G/PE/P PCI to AGP Controller (rev 02)
00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801EB/ER (ICH5/ICH5R) USB UHCI Controller #1 (rev 02)
00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801EB/ER (ICH5/ICH5R) USB UHCI Controller #2 (rev 02)
00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801EB/ER (ICH5/ICH5R) USB UHCI Controller #3 (rev 02)
00:1d.3 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801EB/ER (ICH5/ICH5R) USB UHCI Controller #4 (rev 02)
00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801EB/ER (ICH5/ICH5R) USB2 EHCI Controller (rev 02)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 PCI Bridge (rev c2)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801EB/ER (ICH5/ICH5R) LPC Interface Bridge (rev 02)
00:1f.1 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801EB/ER (ICH5/ICH5R) IDE Controller (rev 02)
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801EB/ER (ICH5/ICH5R) SMBus Controller (rev 02)
00:1f.5 Multimedia audio controller: Intel Corporation 82801EB/ER (ICH5/ICH5R) AC'97 Audio Controller (rev 02)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV18 [GeForce4 MX 440 AGP 8x] (rev c1)
02:00.0 Ethernet controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT6105 [Rhine-III] (rev 8b)
02:0a.0 Multimedia video controller: Conexant CX23880/1/2/3 PCI Video and Audio Decoder (rev 05)
02:0a.2 Multimedia controller: Conexant CX23880/1/2/3 PCI Video and Audio Decoder [MPEG Port] (rev 05)

I am making an educated guess that the last section of the lspci is relevant, but I don't understand what it actually means.

Any help would be very much appreciated.

Probably the driver for the card is not loaded. Modules (aka drivers) in the kernel can either be compiled into the kernel (in which case they do not need to be loaded) or compiled as modules (in which case they do need to be loaded). Most modules such as this one are compiled as modules and need to be loaded using modprobe (or adding the module name to /etc/modules so it loads at boot time). You need to find out what the name of the module (driver) for your card is. You can get a list of modules that are currently loaded by doing lsmod.

I can get mythtv to recognise that the card exists by running the commands:
modprobe videodev
modprobe cx8800
modprobe cx88-dvb
However, I come up with a permission denied message if I am not running mythtv as root.

How do I get the kernel modules to load automatically at bootup? I am having some difficulty understanding the /etc/modprobe.conf file.

How do I change the permissions so that I can use the card as an ordinary user?

Thanks for pointing me in the right direction so far.

To load the modules at boot, you should be able to just put them in /etc/modules. What exactly does the permission denied message say? Can you log into mysql as the mythtv user? I think the permissions issue may be with mysql or mythtv and not the card itself.