Hi folks,
I wanted a USB boroscope for my Slackware box but prior to the purchase was unable to google up anything useful on the subject. But as they were cheap enough on ebay I bought a couple to see how things went. Things went well in both cases and so I decided to document my experience here in order to make some info available for potential future wonderers.

Both were cheap 'brand X' models described as 'Android only, not suitable for iPhone'. but one did mention MS-Windows compatibilty. There was no mention of Linux at all.

I plugged the first one in and checked syslog which showed activity for the device, '/dev/video0' had also been created.
'lsusb' showed Bus 008 Device 003: ID 1908:2311 GEMBIRD. I had no idea what GEMBIRD meant so I googled USB ids and found that Gembird was a maker of many different types of computer hardware. There was nothing about the minor number (2311).
'lsmod showed that the following modules had been loaded:-
Module Size Used by
uvcvideo 77982 0
videobuf2_vmalloc 5260 1 uvcvideo
videobuf2_memops 2011 1 videobuf2_vmalloc
videobuf2_v4l2 20145 1 uvcvideo
videobuf2_core 23430 2 uvcvideo,videobuf2_v4l2
v4l2_common 4447 1 videobuf2_v4l2
videodev 156929 4 uvcvideo,v4l2_common,videobuf2_core,videobuf2_v4l2
So I fired up VLC and selected 'Capture Device' which I pointed to '/dev/video' and there was my picture on the screen. As simple as that.

I then tried the other boroscope.
In this case 'lsusb showed Bus 008 Device 003: ID 1902:8301. I could find nothing for the manufacturer id, this was a true 'brand X' device.
However, everyone else went exactly as for the Gembird device.

Full support built in to Slackware 14.2 out of the box, and if Slackware has it then I'm sure other major distros have it as well. So, if anyone is scratching their heads about whether they can get a boroscope to work under Linux the I would say "Just go ahead and buy one". Unless I was very lucky in my selection it should 'just work'. Though I won't speak for fancy added features. If you do have problems then the modules needed are listed above.

I should also say that the light on these was simply driven off the USB power supply, I did have a few seconds thought when the light appeared to failk to come on for the second device but a tweak of the inline dimmer soon fixed that.

I could find nothing in my 'udev.rules' directory concerning any of these USB ids, so they appear to work without it.

Hope this helps someone.
Cheers, Kimdino.

Bump to remove from 0 response list.

Thanks @kimdino !