My laptop, affectionately called ‘dustpuppy’, is of course running Ubuntu Linux 7.04. After my basic install i had only a few things that didn’t work. The primary non-functional issues was the integrated webcam and the flash card reader. And now webcam works.
How to set it up. Well for this i mainly followed a tutorial available on the Ubuntu Forums by brazzmonkey. However i recreated it for personal use here. Im using an Acer Travelmate 4280 laptop, with 1.3 megapixel Orbicam integrated.
First we need to make sure that the camera is detected
lsusb
and you should be getting something like this
Bus 005 Device 002: ID 046d:0896 Logitech, Inc.
Now we need to install some prerequisites to make able to build the drivers for the webcam
sudo apt-get install build-essential linux-headers-$(uname -r)
Now for getting the drivers. The main download page is here: http://mxhaard.free.fr/download.html
At the time of writing the newest driver is gspcav1-20070508.tar.gz
Lets unpack them
tar zxvf gspcav1-20070508.tar.gz
Compile and install the drivers
cd gspcav1-20070508/
make
sudo make install
Now we have the drivers compiled and installed. A personal note. On this laptop i moved the drivers to /opt/gspcav1-20070508/ before compiling, and installing. Just because i like to keep my own personal order in the folders.
Next we need to tune the module before loading. I will explain why later, but its needed for colors to be shown correctly.
sudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/options
Add this to the end of the file to make sure colors are displayed correctly. Unless of course you are happy looking like a smurf 😉
options gspca force_rgb=0
In the original tutorial the value was supposed to be 1, but for my laptop setting it to 0 seems to be correct value. Now save the file and close gedit.
Now we are ready to load the module, so we can check out webcam is working.
sudo modprobe gspca
Now check that the device node exists.
ls /dev/video*
The result should be something like mine here:
/dev/video0
If you did get a similar result the webcam is now ready for testing. First we need to install a webcam application to use for testing. Camorama is perfect for this. If you dont already have it installed just use this command
sudo apt-get install camorama
And now we can start the application with
camorama
But whats this ?! You seem blue in the face.. have no fear my blue friend. In Camorama under ‘view’ select ‘show effects’.Now the effects pane is added to the dialog. Right click and ‘add filter’ and select the ‘color correction filter’ Now you should instantly become more humanised colors.
The trick here is that its only camorama, so far that i know of, that reverses the colors. So using the color correction filter it shows correctly. Other applications don’t need this. So fire up Ekiga softphone to further test out your webcam and in general just have fun 😀
Hope this helped some people, especially users with this specific laptop. Questions, or comments can be left in comments section 😀
source: ACER Orbicam integrated webcams now supported by GSPCA
Image taken with the webcam:
