Media home developments

I have started to play with getting Mythtv to work. I have the intention of setting up my computer (never to be shut off!) running Slackware 11 as a Mythtv backend, and with VMWare to feed my wife's Windows addiction and for testing, possibly I'll have an older Windows installation for games although I aim to use WINE (in some form) at a later date. The latest version of Mythtv supports UPnP streaming so I finally see a potential for a very nice and integrated solution with my current setup.

But first I need to satisfy the Mythtv requirements, for instance getting the ivtv driver to work. But that's not easy!!! Things seem to work, but I only get static and the way to test seems not very conducive to quickly scanning through the frequencies and finding signals... I just don't see what to do, especially since the wiki discourages installing mythtv or other apps to avoid problems and as far as I can see there's no scanning utility in the ivtv package.

I am on a local cable network so the national channels listed by Teracom are probably not quite corresponding to the channels I receive. So how do people do this?!? I tried installing xawtv because you can change channels using the arrow keys, but no signal (and some say xawtv and ivtv don't mix). On Windows I use GBPVR, which includes a scan tool and there's no difficulty at all. I don't even know what I need to know to use the tools to find the channels - and I can't find the info in the wiki. There's a certain step missing and I guess that I need to continue looking, but I do not know what I'm looking for...

Should I go ahead and install Mythtv? Another tool? Can I otherwise check that the ivtv drivers work? I mean, static is not terribly interesting...

GAAAH!