Bootable Linux CD for watching (HD)TV?

[fouldragon at aol.com]

I recently bought a FusionHDTV 5 RT Lite card.  It all works 
wonderfully, *when it does work*, but it tends to cause a system crash 
in Windows after a few hours of viewing.

To isolate the cause to the OS or the hardware, I'd like to try to fire 
it up under Linux and let it run.  If it can stay up all night, I know 
the real fault is just bad drivers (WHY CAN NOBODY MAKE GOOD TV CARD 
SOFTWARE?)

But I don't want to do a full install if I can avoid it.  Most if not 
all of the bootable CD's I've seen tend to be missing a TV-tuner app.

I've seen MythKnopp or whatever it's called, and apparently to actually 
view stuff you will have to install to the hard drive.

I suspect things might be made even more complex by my use of a fairly 
recent nVidia card (7600GS) which IME requires installation of 
downloadable drivers, and a network whose combination of static IP 
addresses and WPA even stymied Ubuntu 7.04's configuration tools.

Any suggestions?  It's looking like it might be easier to just 
resurrect an old PIII box and use that to test the card in.
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