Firstly -- thanks for your time in helping me. It is very much appreciated.
So what I have done, so far is:
I sort of followed your advice and upgraded to Ubuntu-13.10, and I am now running kernel 3.11.0-17-generic (still 64 bit). Actually this was remarkably trouble free!
I then tried installing the open source drivers. As before, all seems to go smoothly (no compile error messages or anything), but when I reboot, still no
/dev/dvb
directory. Also no errors that I could find in syslog or dmesg.
I then tried installing the drivers supplied with the card (@tbs-linux-drivers_v130901.zip@) and a more recent version from TBS' website (@tbs-linux-drivers_v140210.zip@). Again these both seem to compile fine and no error messages. However, when I reboot the machine, I get the magic /dev/dvb directory.
I then try to setup the mythtv backend. When I get to the tuner section, it auto-selects "DVB-T/S/C, ATSC or ISDB-T tuner card" but underneath it states "Could not get infor for card /dev/dvb/adaptor0/frontend/0. Subtype: unknown error". Various places I have googled say that this is a drive error.
Picking up on your references, there is no mention of "tainted" in the logs. I now have the kernel "3.11.0-17-generic" and the headers "linux-headers-3.11.0-17-generic" installed.
So, again, all advice greatfully recieved. In particular:
* Is there a general problem in using the TBS drivers with mythtv? and
* Am I doing something stupid with the open source drivers (did the commands I used download the correct driver for the TBS 6981SE?)
Many thanks.