Introduction
Webcams in Linux have had a poor press in the past, but thanks to one particular developer from France - Michel Xhaard, over 200 webcams now have drivers that work. Providing you have a supported webcam, you can now have one up and running in minutes.
List of supported webcams.
Note: It is essential that you have a supported webcam to use. I have to be honest and admit I tried for months (on and off) to get an unsupported webcam working and as I have no developer skills, found it impossible. In the end, I bought a cheap Creative Labs NX for £1.99 from ebay - so hardly a huge investment.
The method.
Plug your webcam into a suitable USB port.
Michel's drivers are so good, they are now included in the Debian repositories and so it's simply a case of opening up Synaptic and selecting the driver, spca5xx, mark for installation and click Apply.
Next, select camorama, like so:
Mark and Apply to install.
Now run Camorama by going to Applications >> Graphics >> Camorama Webcam Viewer,
and you will see this:
So. just what can you see?
In the first screen-shot, you can see Camorama on top of the normal web page (it's me pointing the webcam back at the computer screen), and in the second, Camorama itself with a close-up of Tux. It's surprisingly hard to be able to hold the webcam steady, to get a focused view; so please forgive me!
Proof indeed, that webcams do work in Linux!
Alternative method
This is actually the way I installed my webcam, the only difference is, I used the command line. So for all you command line guru's, here's how to do it.
Open up a terminal and su - or sudo to root. Update and upgrade as necessary and then at the prompt type:
This will use '''module assistant''' to install the spac5xx drivers
Now load the drivers by typing:
and finally install canorama by typing:
Finally, my thanks go to machiner, for much of the information on this page and inspiring me to finally get this sorted out.
