I just bought a Micro innovations basic webcam. I did some research but I am lost. Where do I start. I ran gnome meeting and all went well until I tested the video and it told me there was an error while opening /dev/dev/video0 . This much I figured becuase I don't know what to install or do to get it to recognize my usb webcam. Any suggestions would be appreciated and a great help. Thanks.

I am using KDE in Mandrake 10.0 Official.

Webwolf

Anyone LOL? Oh well. Guess its time to boot up XP yet again ahhhhhhh. I have most of what I want set up in Mandrake except for Outer Worlds, Worlds.com(both are virtual chat worlds,) and the web cam. I would love to get those three over to Linux and use Windows even less or not at all. Thanks Anyways.


Webwolf

What model is it exactly?

It is a Micro Innovations Webcam Basic pc/internet video camera. USB connection. Model IC50C.

There is no other information.



Webwolf

After you plug it in to the USB port, run the following /sbin/lsusb as root and report your findings back. The IC50C can show different vendor:product IDs, so it will be important to get the right one.

It may look like: Bus 001 Device 003: ID 0923:010f IC Media Corp. SIIG MobileCam

Well,
Since webwolf looks like he bailed on linux, allow me to hijack the thread as I'm in the same situation as in the original post (except the distro).


My output /sbin/lsusb for the IC50C:

Bus 001 Device 002: ID 093a:2468 Pixart Imaging, Inc.


According to this site (http://mxhaard.free.fr/spca5xx.html) IC50C is supported. I also tried Camstream, but it is not recognizing the device.

Thanks!

MicroInnovations is notorious for changing their camera internals and continually re-branding it as the same model number. The good news is that that vendor:product code matches another camera that the spca5xx driver supports, the "Trust Wb 1200P". Three questions then:

What version of the driver are you using?

Are you plugging it into a USB hub or directly into the PC?

After you plug in the camera into your USB port, can you run "dmesg" and see what the output is. The last dozen or so lines should indicate the USB device was plugged in and the driver picking it up. Can you post that data?

Just looked more closely at the spca5xx site. It seems that release 0.57.09 supports the vendor:product code for 0x093a:0x2468

Thanks tiger,

I'm having serious hard drive issues at the moment , so I'll have to get that all back to normal before I can tackle webcam.

Before all that I did manage to see the dmesg output, but it was not obvious to me what was about the webcam/driver.

The webcam will be plugged in directly to PC.

more to follow....

I'll watch for your update. Good luck!

I'm back!
OK, dmesg doesn't yield anything about a webcam. (looking at http://www.linux.com/howtos/Webcam-HOWTO/hardware.shtml as a sample). Neither does lsmod.

I'm trying to follow that how-to site, but am getting lost in the terminology.
Is the next step to find out if I have the spca5xx module somewhere in Linspire's /lib/modules? I couldn't find it, but I'm not sure I searched for the right thing (*spca5xx*).
Thanks!

Don't forget to grab the lastest version from here and recompile.

OK, Got it done. I can use Camstream with the webcam.
Took me hours of research as I've never compiled anything before.
- Bill