:: Webcams on Linux - Part 1 ::

dougsland sent a message on the tchelinux mailing list asking us to report on webcams which would not be working on Linux.

Well, so far I have two webcams at my disposal. One on my netbook (which I never used, but tried) and the one my father gave us (remember that old howto? It's been a long time since I tried to use the later, but I do remember the image was some what terrible. So, after reading his "scream for report" I decided to give them (both the webcams) another try.

Good news is the webcam on my netbook (Positivo Mobo 1050) looks to be working perfectly. I just activated it and used kopete to test it. Bellow is a "nice" screenshot of the result:

*** the ugly face is not the webcam's fault :P

Ah, sure, I am running Slackware on my netbook (slackware-current), kernel 2.6.29.1 and KDE-4.2.2. The webcam is a BisonCam NB Pro (by means of dmesg).

EDIT: dougsland asked me to add dmesg and lsusb output, so this post might be more useful for other people ;)

dmesg:

• usb 1-5: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 7
• usb 1-5: New USB device found, idVendor=5986, idProduct=0203
• usb 1-5: New USB device strings: Mfr=0, Product=1, SerialNumber=0
• usb 1-5: Product: BisonCam, NB Pro
• usb 1-5: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
• uvcvideo: Found UVC 1.00 device BisonCam, NB Pro (5986:0203)
• input: BisonCam, NB Pro as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1d.7/usb1/1-5/1-5:1.0/input/input11
• uvcvideo: UVC non compliance - GET_MIN/MAX(PROBE) incorrectly supported. Enabling workaround.

lsusb:

• Bus 001 Device 008: ID 5986:0203 Acer, Inc

dougsland (and others who might be interested), later I will try my D-Link webcam on my Bluewhite64 and see what I get.

So... wait for the next repot ;)