Greetz...
After carefully considering advantages and disadvantages of an upgrade to R5B7, I finally decided to brake the rule of "never touch a running system" and started upgrading my systems yesterday evening following the advice available, i.e. backing up vital things, never run apt-get install etc...
The good news: it basically worked. I got my MasterBackend up and running and was able to watch TV with the FrontEnd running on that machine (well, ok, after some finetuning with mysql
)
Then all of a sudden fate struck: I tried to get up my SAA7134-based analog Tevion MD9717 TV-card (some of you might remember that I need that piece of crap only to watch my analog VHS) and of course came across the standard message from saa7134, telling me that there is no way to autodetect the card due to missing eproms... Oh yes, I know well that message and I also know what to do to cope with it. At least I thought so until yesterday... The required saa7134 options clearly are "card=6 tuner=5", since I used them in R5A30. So as usual I updated /etc/modutils/aliases from
Code:
...
alias char-major-81 bttv
...
alias char-major-81 bttv
...
to look like
Code:
...
#alias char-major-81 bttv
alias char-major-81 videodev
alias char-major-81-0 saa7134
...
options saa7134 card=6 tuner=5
#alias char-major-81 bttv
alias char-major-81 videodev
alias char-major-81-0 saa7134
...
options saa7134 card=6 tuner=5
After
Code:
update-modules
I could verify that /etc/modules.conf was reflecting the changes made, so I did a reboot of the machine and things should have been golden... Damn! 
The message keeps appearing and as a result, I cannot use my analog TV-card, since the driver does not recognize the COMPOSITE input I am using.
So I recalled that I made a backup of my old modules.conf. But fate struck again: due to "massive human error"
when handling tar, that backup just went to byte heaven so I have nothing left to compare. I fortunately have available a disk image of hda1 (prepared by partimage the day before yesterday), but I am kind of reluctant to completely overwrite my neatly running R5B7 just to check for a most likely identical modules.conf.
Could someone please help me out by pointing me to a missing step in my configuration? Did I overlook something, some dependency, some minor step?