I recently formatted my laptop's hard drive in a fit of rage and installed openSuse 10.2 for the heck of it. I have been able to get most of my hardware to work(actually, almost everything worked right off the bat). I've even been able to get most of the games I play working this first day(Guild Wars, Counter-Strike, Garry's Mod, good stuff) Anyway, my laptop has a built in webcam, but I can't figure out how to get it running. I got this laptop from Cyberpower, an online computer company. After finding and perusing the original order email, all I could learn about the webcam is that it is a "1.3 megapixel webcam." Real helpful. Anyway, I have loaded up all the firewire modules and whatnot, but after doing so nothing can see the camera, so I figure it isn't a firewire type camera(but it was worth a shot). Has anyone got any idea what I could do to enable this thing?

First you will need to get more info on the make/model/ID of the camera. Google is a good place to start. Look up the Laptop itself, determine who actually made it and what's the motherboard is (Intel, Via, etc) and find out some specs on the parts (namely the camera).

Now, I'm not sure if it's going to be considered a USB camera or a PCI camera, but for either, try these commands in a console (probably as root): 'lsusb' and 'lspci' and if the camera shows up there somewhere, post all information it shows (like the BusID and any numbers or codes it gives).

The main ingredients to getting a camera working is the Vendor ID, the Product ID, and what controller chip is used inside the thing. This information is what will determine which driver you will be looking for. The needed information will look *something* like: "0x0453:0c3214 and spca5xxx or gspca/le" or something like this. If you see anything resembling this, please post it.
There are literally hundreds of webcams supported by Linux, but it can be a teensy bit of experimentation getting it working perfectly. Another place to start looking for the correct driver is http://mxhaard.free.fr/spca5xx.html
which provides a long list over several pages of identified cameras, drivers, and if/how they work with Linux.

Upon running lsusb I noticed this entry:
Bus 005 Device 002: ID 0c45:624f Microdia

I googled Microdia and found that they do make webcams. Then I checked out that link you gave me, and found a camera with the same 0c45 vendor id, and under Pseudo it said Microdia, so I figure this may well be my camera. Under Driver, it gives me <a href="http://linux-uvc.berlios.de/">this link</a>, to a driver page, where I learned that the driver appears to be in an early alpha stage. I obtained the source via SVN, and tried to compile it, but it looks like I might need to set it up to compile using the kernel source somehow, but I am unsure how to do this. Is it a very complicated procedure?

http://svn.berlios.de/svnroot/repos/...nux-uvc/trunk/

OK, Im not totally sure what you're looking at for the driver. The link I put here claims to be the svn/trunk for the C files to make the driver. If you were to download or copy and save all these files, then the procedure would be to enter the folder where they are saved, and just do 'make' and 'make install'.
Compiling stuff is very easy, but with something like this (svn or un-released) stuff, there's no guarantee that it will work.
I cannot locate anywhere that claims that your exact camera is supported.
What happened exactly when you tried to compile what you have? Were there errors, or...?
I also have a Microdia camera and I got mine working using the spca5xx driver and v4l-2 kernel support. There's no guarantee this would also work for your camera, but it may be worth a try.
Anyhow, if it's a different link you have than the one I posted here, please give the one you have.
NOTE: Both the vendor ID AND the product ID must match for any reasonable degree of certainty, meaning both halves of the 0x1234:0x1234 code.

Yes, I tried to compile but received this error: make[1]: *** No rule to make target `modules'. Stop.
Both my vendor and product IDs do not match, so perhaps this driver wouldn't work anyway.

EDIT: I installed the linux kernel sources and now I can run make and make install without incident. Still not showing the camera though :/