Compiling v4l

First you need to install packages required to build kernel modules

 sudo apt-get install linux-source
 sudo apt-get install linux-headers-$(uname -r) build-essential 

Since the kernel sources comes as a compressed package in /usr/src we need to uncompress that and link it in under our kernel version.

 cd /usr/src
 sudo bunzip linux-source-$(uname -r).bz2
 sudo tar -xvf linux-source-$(uname -r).tar
 sudo ln -s /usr/src/linux-source-$(uname -r)/ /lib/modules/$(uname -r)-generic/source 

Install Mercurial (cvs like program)

 sudo apt-get install mercurial

Retrieve the v4l-dvb source tree

 cd ~
 hg clone http://linuxtv.org/hg/v4l-dvb 

Change into the v4l-dvb directory

 cd v4l-dvb

Build the modules

 make

Install the modules

 sudo make install

Download the firmware, and load the card specific modules. I've done it for both HVR-1300 and Nova-T500, see TvcardTest and http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/Hauppauge_WinTV_Nova-T_500_PCI