These are some instructions you'll have to follow to make an af9005 based 
dvb-t usb receiver.
Things will hopefully get easier if and when the driver is integrated in
v4l-dvb.

1) get a snapshot of the current v4l-dvb driver http://www.linuxtv.org/repo/

2) put the *.c and *.h files you find here in the 
   linux/drivers/media/dvb/dvb-usb subdirectory

3) put the af9005.fw file where your distro expects firmware (usually
   /lib/firmware but that's not always the case)

4) go to the v4l-dvb top directory and apply the af9005-config.diff
       patch -p1 < af9005-config.diff

5) make && make install
  (if you're using a distribution that uses compressed modules, e.g.
   mandriva, you probably have to remove any .ko.gz file where the last step
   installed a plain .ko file, it's probably safe to just completely remove the
   /lib/modules/`uname -r`/kernel/drivers/media/dvb/ directory before doing
   the final "make install")

6) insert the usb stick and watch /var/log/messages for messages like these:

Jan  7 17:56:00 vdr kernel: dvb-usb: found a 'Afatech DVB-T USB1.1 stick' in cold state, will try to load a firmware
Jan  7 17:56:00 vdr kernel: dvb-usb: downloading firmware from file 'af9005.fw'
Jan  7 17:56:00 vdr kernel: dvb-usb: found a 'Afatech DVB-T USB1.1 stick' in warm state.
Jan  7 17:56:00 vdr kernel: dvb-usb: will use the device's hardware PID filter (table count: 32).
Jan  7 17:56:00 vdr kernel: DVB: registering new adapter (Afatech DVB-T USB1.1 stick).
Jan  7 17:56:00 vdr kernel: DVB: registering frontend 1 (AF9005 USB DVB-T)...
Jan  7 17:56:00 vdr kernel: dvb-usb: schedule remote query interval to 200 msecs.
Jan  7 17:56:00 vdr kernel: dvb-usb: Afatech DVB-T USB1.1 stick successfully initialized and connected.

    especially look for any error during the initialization of the device.
    If they look like these everything should be working fine.

7) use scan (or dvbscan or scandvb, the name depends on how your distribution
   packages the dvb utils) to find channels and create a channels.conf.
   See http://linuxtv.org/wiki/index.php/First_steps_with_a_DVB_card

8) use any program you like to watch tv (e.g. xine, mplayer, kaffeine).
   I'm using vdr so I don't know anything about the other programs.
   At http://linuxtv.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page you can find a list of
   programs under the heading "applications to watch tv".