I have a Samsung laptop with a built-in webcam that identifies itself as a Vimicro Namuga. More obscure you can't get! I have Dragora on it, which is perhaps not a good idea as it's a completely libre distro.

The video capture program provided is gtkam (a gtk front end to gphoto) but it doesn't see the webcam because it isn't on the gphoto list. Googling suggested that cheese wouldn't work either with this type of camera but that luvcview would. Unfortunately this is a mnoribund project; Debian has dropped it, which is always a bad sign. I got the source from Ubuntu and built it myself, but whenever I tried to use it, X crashed. Back to the drawing board!

Guvcview is a fork of luvcview and it is current. Unfortunately it has a string of dependencies that weren't available from Dragora (the distro has a very small repository). So I had to build several libraries before building guvcview itself, and then I had to patch the code to make it build at all. At one point I was really thinking of giving up Dragora altogether and putting Debian on it instead. But when I finally invoked the program -- wonder of wonders! -- I got a window with my face in it!

There are still a lot of error messages (I have no idea if they matter or not) and there is a huge time lag between my doing something and it showing up in the picture, but I'm chuffed that I got it to work at all.