LinuxQuestions.org - How can I configure my webcam for use in linux?

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Quote:

The webcam works in Fedora, Ubuntu and Arch. I haven't tried it in PCLinuxOS.

I used the program luvcview. In Fedora, I had to install it from source. The version is current at time of writing (early February, 2008). You will need some development tools and libraries.

Code:

yum install make gcc gcc-c++ kernel-devel SDL-devel

Code:

wget

http://mxhaard.free.fr/spca50x/Inves...0070512.tar.gz

tar zxvf luvcview-20070512.tar.gz

cd luvcview-20070512

make && make install

It will install the program into /usr/local/bin. You will have to fix permissions before you can run it as a regular user. (If you want it in /usr/bin/ for consistancy, you can edit the Makefile. Towards the top they define some variables, including BIN. It's defined as /usr/local/bin--you can change it to /usr/bin.)

Add the following to /etc/security/console.perms.d/50-default.perms. At the top where they list devices you can add

Code:

<video>=/dev/video0

At the bottom, where they list permissions, you can add

Code:

<console> 0666 <video> 0600 root

To start using it without a reboot, just do as root or with root privilege

Code:

chmod 666 /dev/video0

If you now start the program with

Code:

luvcview -f yuv

you should be able to see yourself as you type. It works, so I've read, with Ekiga, though I haven't tried it. With Ekiga and any other app that asks, choose V4L2 rather than V4L or V4L1.

In Ubuntu, it's a bit simpler.

Code:

apt-get install luvcview

After that, use the same command as above, luvcview -f yuv. (The -f is for format. The default is jpg but that doesn't seem to work.)

In Arch, I had a bit of difficulty. Although there is a linux-uvc-svn in the community repo, it may be out of date. It insisted on putting the module in /lib/modules/2.6.23-Arch when I had kernel 2.6.24. So, when I did modprobe uvcvideo, I would get module not found. Eventually, I grabbed the source code with

Code:

svn://svn.berlios.de/linux-uvc/linux-uvc/trunk

Note that you need to have subversion installed for that to work. Subversion can be installed with pacman -S subversion.

Once it's downloaded, you'll see a new directory called trunk. Just cd into trunk and do make && make install. It should install the module in the proper place. You can then load the module with

Code:

modprobe uvcvideo

One can then install luvcview from AUR.

However, that didn't work for me either. I didn't feel like investigating at that point so I grabbed the source code from the URL given above in the Fedora section.

I then built it with make && make install as I had in Fedora. In Arch, a user of the webcam has to be in the video group. If the user name was john, you could do it thusly.

Code:

usermod -G video -a john

Now, the user john can use luvcview.

Code:

luvcview -f yuv

I also have a webcam that uses uvcvideo driver and I havent bothered with it yet. Let me know how it goes.