Saturday, March 11, 2006

Installing Logitech QuickCam Webcam

I first tried the latest version 1.1 of the qc-usb driver but I kept getting errors. /dev/video0 would not load. I kept getting an error from the ./quickcam.sh line 699 and other such things. After trying various things I deleted the installation folder, restarted the computer and decided to try an older version of the qc-usb driver. I tried qc-usb-0.6.3 and the cam worked on the first try! Heres the walkthrough...

1. Make sure the RIGHT kernel sources are installed.

a. Check the kernel version number.
cat /proc/version
Output on my system:
Linux version 2.6.13-15.8-default (geeko@buildhost) (gcc version 4.0.2
20050901 (prerelease) (SUSE Linux)) #1 Tue Feb 7 11:07:24 UTC 2006


b. Check if source is installed
rpm -qa kernel*

On my system this returns:
kernel-default-nongpl-2.6.13-15.8
kernel-update-tool-0.9-10
kernel-default-2.6.13-15.8
kernel-source-2.6.13-15.8

Note the line kernel-source.

2. Setup Kernel Sources:

a. Execute the following as root:
cp /usr/src/linux-2.6.13-15.8-obj/i386/default/.config /usr/src/linux/.config
cp /usr/src/linux-2.6.13-15.8-obj/i386/default/scripts/mod/modpost /usr/src/linux/scripts/modpost
cp /usr/src/linux-2.6.13-15.8-obj/i386/default/scripts/genksyms/genksyms /usr/src/linux/scripts/genksyms/genksyms
cp /usr/src/linux-2.6.13-15.8-obj/i386/default/scripts/basic/fixdep /usr/src/linux/scripts/basic/fixdep
cp /usr/src/linux-2.6.13-15.8-obj/i386/default/scripts/mod/modpost /usr/src/linux/scripts/mod/modpost

b. You also need to put Module.symvers into the right place.
cp /boot/symvers-2.6.13-15.8-i386-default.gz /usr/src/linux
mv symvers-2.6.13-15.8-i386-default.gz Module.symvers.gz
gunzip /usr/src/linux/Module.symvers.gz
make modules_prepare


3. You need a working installation of gcc >= 2.95

4. Get qc-usb: Logitech QuickCam USB Video Camera driver

5. Install xawtv - Video4Linux TV application (Athena)

6. Run the installation (not as Root) and follow on screen instruction. Here if I didnt specify the location of my kernel sources the script kept complaining.
./quickcam.sh LINUX_DIR=/usr/src/linux

Thats it...

You can use ./qcset to configure the cam..

Check out this link for more info on the installation on SuSE 10.0:
http://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/feature/16340.html
The first section describes how to ready the machine for the installation and the second section is for installation of the Logitech Zoom Cam..

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