Aspire 9300 webcam

[infiniphunk]

Hello, I've just set up Feisty on a friend's Acer Aspire 9300 and have everything working, except for the built in webcam. Now Feisty does detect the USB 2.0 camera, but I have not been able to get it working. I tried Amsn and Camorama. When I launch Camorama, I get "Could not connect to video device (/dev/video0) Please check connection".
This will be my friend's first time having linux, and I would really like to get this working for him.

Any ideas?

thnx in advance

[infiniphunk]

Hello my friends!
Time now for a shameless ^^^^^^^^^^^^BUMP ^^^^^^^^^^^

[ph34r]

You got the driver for it? Try ucvideo (sp?) its a universal driver for 200+ cams, but v4l2 only. May want to see what dmesg and lspci and lsusb say about it, maybe lshal

[infiniphunk]

hey thanks for replying. Unfortunately I no longer have the laptop in my possession, gave it back to the owner, so its his to worry about now.

Thanks

[jl_harry12]

For those in the UK "Linux Format" has a review of hardware that works with Linux - - - webcams need not apply!
Indeed the list is pretty short and if I'd read that first, I wouldn't have tried Ubuntu, yet surprisingly nearly everything works as it should - apart from some rather important aspects...which is why this is a WinPC.....but I don't think this will remain so....not now that Dell is in the frame.....
Multifunction printer makers, scanners, and all manner of kit may just think it's worth the effort - - - - web-cams+mics for sure, maybe even hand-held devices like the Wii "joystick" and a decent scanner for trannies would be nice. Not those over-spec Nikon ones - something like the Epson that has a good light in the lid and will scan roll-film as well as 35mm - good enough as a back-up - compared with nothing as of now!...

If a USB-device is plugged-in, how does the OS know it's a camera? - doesn't it "look" like changing data? - perhaps this is what confuses the software, so It ignores it, thinking it's a loosely connected memory stick.

[bwkaz]

If a USB-device is plugged-in, how does the OS know it's a camera?

Depends.

The USB interface spec has a way of getting device identification from each connected device. The data includes vendor ID, device ID, and class/interface IDs. For most class IDs, there's an official spec for how all devices of that class are supposed to work. (The PCI bus has the same types of vendor/device ID, plus class ID. But it doesn't really specify how all devices of the "network" class, for instance, are supposed to work, so the class ID is pretty much useless when trying to bind a driver to a device. But since USB has those specs, it is possible there.)

Most still cameras report themselves as supporting the USB storage class. They expose their set of pictures as files.

There may not be a USB video class, though. If there is, and there's a spec for it, then there should be a driver for it in the kernel, and any distro (using a new-enough kernel) should be able to use those devices. But if there isn't a video class, or there isn't a spec, then new drivers will be vendor-specific (they'll match a vendor/device pair instead of a class ID). That means you'll have to wait until the right driver gets written, and your distro starts shipping it.

(Or you can go search for a driver yourself. If one exists (and beware of drivers from the manufacturers: they're almost invariably crappy), you should be able to find it.)