I am definitely a Linux newbie. Is it possible to take a small client PC, with a webcam attached, install a very small customized version of linux and it into a IP camera device? Anyone know of a way to do this?

Thanks,
Goz

Hi,

Welcome to LQ.

What have you tried to date?

I see no reason that would prevent you from using a PC with a camera as a subsystem with a GNU/Linux OS. What type of PC and specs? What do you want to do?
Which distro?

you dont need a customized linux distribution to do that
just take any distribution and install a bare bones installation with or without a gui that can network and access your webcam.. a good program for streaming video from a webcam to a network would be VLC (www.videolan.org)

What exactly do you want to do with such a device? Are you aware that you can buy webcams with built in network connectivity that you can access over the Internet without any other equipment?

There are search terms you can put in to Google to find such cameras. e.g. http://www.i-hacked.com/content/view/81/42/
Some of these cameras are probably meant to be open for anyone to see, others are probably owned by people who just don't realise that if they plug something in to the Internet then other people can find it and hence it doesn't occur to them to spend two minutes putting on a password.

Thanks for the welcome and replies!

I haven't tried anything yet because I wasnt sure it was possible. What I want to do is take a webcam and turn it into an IP camera using linux on the host the webcam is attached to. The webcam is USB. The OS I was thinking about was UBuntu. I have UBuntu installed and can see the webcam image in cheese. I'm not sure how to get it to look like a IP camera to another network linux host. Will VLC do this?

Thanks

if it is recognized as a video device it should