[gNewSense-users] Re: GSPCA

[Brian Kemp]

Dale wrote:
> you can have a look here http://mxhaard.free.fr/spca5xx.html  to see
> the supported web cams by the gspca driver :-)

I have a camera that I bought for a different environment that works
under the GSPCA driver.

IMO, if you can avoid it, *don't* buy cameras that this driver
supports. It's a last-resort sort of thing. *All* of the
GSPCA-supported cameras were reverse-engineered with no support from
the manufacturer--so you're not really voting with your dollar
effectively.

Since the driver is reverse-engineered, support can be shaky. Ekiga
picks it up fine, but most other v4l v1 compliant tools choke. The
driver doesn't speak v4l v2 yet.

Okay, now for the fun part:

Some cameras in that driver do contain captured firmware
transmissions. (The one I was using doesn't, but this is still a
problem.)

In Debian/Ubuntu/gNewsense, spca5xx-source is the package; however this is old.

Since the driver package does contain (captured) firmware, we should
remove it from gNewSense altogether.

If you really want to use the driver after all the reasons not to, get
the latest driver off the free.fr site, which was renamed to gspcav1.
Do note you will have to build the module yourself. There are
instructions on the Ubuntu Wiki.