Sunday, May 4, 2008

How to install a webcam on Debian (and distro Debian-base)

This howto is for who want to use a USB-webcham on your Linux-Box (debian is best - of course)

The first one is to see the "chipset", the vendor of our hardware with this command (before - of course - I have plugged cam):

$ lsusb

output is this:

Bus 003 Device 002: ID 03f0:8904 Hewlett-Packard
Bus 003 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
Bus 002 Device 002: ID 0ac8:0302 Z-Star Microelectronics Corp. ZC0302 WebCam
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
Bus 001 Device 003: ID 0a12:0001 Cambridge Silicon Radio, Ltd Bluetooth Dongle (HCI mode)
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 0000:0000

how you can see my webcam have Z-Star like chip.

Now that we have the chip, we must install the source so we'll be able to compile driver (the compatibilty for your webcam can find here ).

Type in console this:

$ apt-get install gspca-source

NB: here you can find also the .deb for spca5xx, I have used NOT spca5xx but the rewrite driver gspca, you can find here .

Now we'll go to install the driver by compile it on our linux-box.

Download the driver from here (you can put attention to download that for kernel up from 2.6.11 or below, you known)

Now let's go to path where you have the tar.gz, uncompressed it, go in and type:

$ m-a auto-install gspca

load module with

$ modprobe gspca

Now to configure your cam can use software like camstream (this is mine) or camorama:

$ apt-get install camstream


This is the result of this few and easy steps. Screenshoot

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