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Install and use common USB webcams under Linux.
Webcams have a variety of uses, from video conferencing to surveillance to just showing your friends what you are doing at the moment. Linux support for webcams, particularly USB webcams, is pretty good, provided you know where to look. Once the webcam is installed, there are a lot of programs available to take quick snapshots, automatically upload images to a server periodically, and even turn your webcam into a motion detector. In this hack, I cover the general steps you need to install a webcam under Linux, and highlight some of the popular Linux webcam applications.
Install the Webcam
The first and most difficult step to installing a webcam is figuring out which Linux module it uses. There are a number of webcam modules built into the standard kernel series, but there are also quite a few that aren’t, so the sort of detective work you need to do will vary depending upon your webcam. Before you do too much detective work though, just plug in your webcam and check the output of dmesg to see if your system automatically recognizes your webcam. Here is some sample dmesg output showing a webcam being recognized.
$ dmesg … usb 1-1: new full speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 3 Linux video capture interface: v1.00 /home/greenfly/src/spca5xx-20050701/drivers/usb/spca5xx.c: USB SPCA5xx camera found. Type Labtec Webcam (unknown CCD) /home/greenfly/src/spca5xx-20050701/drivers/usb/spca5xx.c: [spca5xx_probe: ...Get Linux Multimedia Hacks now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
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