I'm sure there is a very simple way to do this, but my linux knowledge is still pretty limited, so maybe someone can spell it out for me in simple terms.

I get snow when I try to watch tv after a reboot.

Even though I've set the default starting channel to 3 in setup menu, I have to manually run the command:

ivtv-tune -c 3 -d /dev/video0

as root every time I reboot my machine in order to set the tuner to the right channel and see my directv feed. After that everything runs smoothly.

My question is, how do I automatically run this command at boot each time without having to open a terminal window and do it manually.

Again, I'm sure there is a very easy way to do this, but I finally got this thing running and I'm terrified of changing any of the startup scripts and wrecking my machine.

While I haven't used Knoppmyth before (will as soon as the version with .20 is out)

Can't you just put that in your init.d scripts? It will run that everytime the computer starts up.

Don't worry about putting it in your startup scripts directory. Either it runs or it doesn't

The general technique for doing little tweaks like this at boot time is to add the commands to the end of /etc/init.d/bootmisc.sh, however, this really shouldn't be necessary and I suspect that you've got something else misconfigured.

While I completely agree with you, I can't for the life of me figure out what that could possibly be. In the backend setup, I have channel 3 selected for the default channel to tune to (the one that says set this if you use an external box to change channels) but it has no effect.