How to compile Webcam Drivers gspca for Puppy 2.17?

[Xopotl]

I've tried out this new Puppy Release 2.17 and it's great... works like a breeze, even on new hardware.

One small prob, though,...
i can't seem to compile the gspca webcam driver for this kernel 2.6.21.5

I've put the kernel library and development sfs files on my usb stick, and it works immediatey (wow), i've downloaded the latest driver files from http://mxhaard.free.fr for kernel up from 2.6.11 (gspcav1-20070508.tar.gz) and did what is said in the readme.

No success, i'm afraid. Gives errors during compilation. Anyone else had any luck and can post the compiled module ? Or create a pub ? Or a small howto ?

Thanks in advance !!

Shouldn't it be handy to put this in the standard release ?

[vabene06]

Hey,
i compiled the gspca-driver for puppy 2.17. I have problems with installing it (insmod), but at least the driver works for my webcam. Try it. Vabene

[mcewanw]

I tried installing the above gspca pet onto my puppy 2.17 system, but it messed up my system by creating a lot of extra directories in the root (/) directory. I didn't have any success with the file gspca.ko either (though I didn't test it very thoroughly because I didn't trust the install - I think the compiled module should have ended up somewhere in /lib/modules and not leave so many files all over the root directory?).

[vabene06]

you are right,
delete all the files exept the gspca.ko driver. Put this driver into lib/modules/2.6.21.5/kernel/drivers/video. Then try modprobe, insmod . I got my webcam to work.
Vabene

[JohnB]

I am running Puppy 2.17 and have used your Pet, transferred gspca.ko and tried modprobe gspca and got the following:

# modprobe gspca
FATAL: Error inserting gspca (/lib/modules/2.6.21.5/initrd/usb/gspca.ko): Invalid module format

dsmeg shows:

Linux video capture interface: v2.00
sn9c102: V4L2 driver for SN9C1xx PC Camera Controllers v1:1.34
usb 2-1.4: SN9C10[12] PC Camera Controller detected (vid/pid 0x0C45:0x600D)
usb 2-1.4: PAS106B image sensor detected
usb 2-1.4: Initialization succeeded
usb 2-1.4: V4L2 device registered as /dev/video0
usb 2-1.4: Optional device control through 'sysfs' interface disabled
usbcore: registered new interface driver sn9c102

I needless to say just get a blank screen on xawtv and muppywebcam.

Webcams are clearly an area where Puppy clearly doesn't "Just work".

Any suggestions? It appears that Puppy recognises that I have a camera, just need to persuade it to let me see what is on it.

[vabene06]

Hello John,
i had the same problems. But now, when i make a modprobe -l i see, that the driver gspca.ko is in lib/modules/2.6.21.5/kernel/drivers/video AND in lib/modules/2.6.21.5/kernel/drivers/usb/media !!
Maybe this is the right place. Make a copy and put it in. then restart an make modprobe gspca. The driver works fine for me in camstream (I dont use xawtv).
Vabene

[JohnB]

Vabene
I folowed your advice and liberally scattered gspca.ko around but still no picture. I note however that when xawtv window starts up it quotes video as 1280 x 1024. My cheapo webcam isn't anything as capable as that. Is there a way of limiting xawtv's expectations and getting a picture?

Note that you use camstream and I went to the web site. Looks nice but to compile this in Puppy is well beyond me. Is there a dotpup?

[vabene06]

Hallo John,
do you get the welcome-screen from xawtv? If yes, klik ok and then go with the cursor to the the black screen and klik with the right mouse tab. Options appear. Maybe there is to less brightnes.
Another question: Have you tried watchdog v2? It has installed xawtv with the (older Kernel) the gspca-driver. I only have to make a modprobe gspca and then start with xawtv.

vabene

[MU]

if you have mplayer installed, you also can use that to watch the webcam:
mplayer tv:// -tv driver=v4l:width=352:height=288:device=/dev/video0
Mark

[mcewanw]

Hello vabene06,

I extracted gspca.ko from your pet compilation and put it in the relevant /lib/modules directory (actually I put it in several for the moment until I determine the actually required one more definitely...). Using info from MU and NickBiker and others, found from various forum threads I then pieced everything together and got my webcam working. Great, thanks!

Finding everything I needed took ages, so to help others with such problems related to webcams and tv cards more generally, I have compiled a very rough howto and put it in the howto section of the forum at:
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 870#138870

Actually, it is less of a howto than a collection of extracts from the above posts in one place [thanks guys].

If there is any way you could extract gspca.ko from your gspcav1.pet and upload it on that thread (or here if you prefer) that would be even better, since it would avoid all the extra files and directories being written to directory /

Thanks so much for your work; I would hate to have had to go through the whole process of compiling gspca.ko for myself! Hopefully NickBiker is planning an update of his camwizard utility. Pity the manufacturers of webcam drivers (etc) don't support Linux better - it remains the biggest problem moving to Linux IMHO. I've moved to Puppy Linux as my main OS now anyway!

[vabene06]

Hallo,
its ok, i wanted only a driver-pet, but took the wrong one. This should be better.
vabene

[mcewanw]

Thanks alot vabene06, I've modified my howto at http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 870#138870 to refer to your new pet for gscpa.ko. I've also indicated that your pet automatically creates the directory media under usb (i.e. /lib/modules/2.6.21.5/kernel/drivers/usb/media) and puts gspca.ko into there.

Great job! Well done.

[JohnB]

Tried all suggestions including mcewanw's howto console start up. Still have no picture but at least it is more informative as to what is happening. Feedback when I try to start is as follows:

xawtv -noxv -nodga
This is xawtv-3.95, running on Linux/i686 (2.6.21.5)
WARNING: Your X-Server has no DGA support.
/dev/video0 [v4l2]: no overlay support
v4l-conf had some trouble, trying to continue anyway
Warning: Cannot convert string "7x13bold" to type FontStruct
Warning: Cannot convert string "-*-ledfixed-medium-r-*--39-*-*-*-c-*-*-*" to type FontStruct
ioctl: VIDIOC_G_STD(std=0xb7be6b8800000000 [(null),(null),(null),(null),(null),(null),(null),(null),(null),(null),(null),(null),(null),(null),(null),(null),(null),(null),(null)]): Invalid argument
config: invalid value for norm: (null)
valid choices for "norm":
ioctl: VIDIOC_S_CTRL(id=9963777;value=0): Invalid argument
ioctl: VIDIOC_S_STD(std=0x0 []): Invalid argument
no way to get: 384x288 32 bit TrueColor (LE: bgr-)

What is DGA support and how do I get some? Do I need to run the xorg setup again?
Thanks for support.

[mcewanw]

JohnB (Posted: Sat Sep 01, 2007 4:42 pm Post subject: Webcam Woes) wrote:
got the following:
# modprobe gspca
FATAL: Error inserting gspca (/lib/modules/2.6.21.5/initrd/usb/gspca.ko): Invalid module format

Hello John,

I don't know why you are getting the above message. Just as a further experiment, I ran a fresh copy of puppy 2.17.1 in ram [pfix=ram], reinstalled gspca using vabene's newest gspcav1-20070508-i586.pet download from: http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... ch&id=5467
That .pet package automatically puts vabene's gspca.ko file in /lib/modules/2.6.21.5/kernel/drivers/usb/media/
[not in the directory your error message above indicates]
The pet package manager reports that it can't be uninstalled because "not registered", however, that's no problem.

Then I opened an rxvt console and entered the following three commands in succession:
-----
depmod -a
modprobe videodev
modprobe gspca
-----

No error messages were reported at all. Everything fine so far.

I then installed the xawtv-3.95.pup from http://www.moyo.me.uk/pupplinux/xawtv-3.95.pup
[EDIT: xawtv not there anymore. Find it instead at: http://dotpups.de/dotpups/Multimedia/pu ... v-3.95.pup ]
and ran the program with the command:

xawtv -noxv

That worked with my plugged in usb webcam. It also worked if instead I entered: xawtv -noxv -nodga

Didn't matter whether I used Xorg or Xvesa on my puppy system, same result, still worked fine...
-------------

However, if I plug in my other webcam, which presumably needs a different driver than the gspca one, I get the following message on trying to run xawtv:

# xawtv -noxv -nodga
This is xawtv-3.95, running on Linux/i686 (2.6.21.5)
WARNING: Your X-Server has no DGA support.
can't open /dev/video0: No such device
v4l-conf had some trouble, trying to continue anyway
v4l2: open /dev/video0: No such device
v4l2: open /dev/video0: No such device
v4l: open /dev/video0: No such device
no video grabber device available
---------------

But, as I say, that just seems to indicate that my second type of webcam isn't compatible with the gspca driver.

I still find your "FATAL: Error inserting gspca" surprising though. Even without any webcam plugged in, "depmod -a; modprobe videodev; modprobe gspca" works fine for me without error. The only thing I can suggest is that you use Gtkfind to locate each and every gspca.* on your system and remove all of them before reinstalling vabene's newest gspcav1-20070508-i586.pet just in case your system is picking up some other version. If that is not the case then I really don't know what the problem could be, sorry. What kind of computer system are you using?

As far as what dga is... mplayer's manual page at http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/man/en/mplayer.1.html also has a dga option, which it describes as follows:

dga (X11 only) - Play video through the XFree86 Direct Graphics Access extension. Considered obsolete.

I wouldn't know if that has anything to do with your problem though. You can find a lot more info about dga at the main mplayer doc page: http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/HTML-singl ... r.html#dga

Sorry I can't really help on this occasion. It all just works for me.

[edoc]

I'd like to get my TAIDE Web Cam.with USB 1.1/2.0 support to work with Puppy.

I have TEENpup on one laptop and 3.01 on another, both have USB 1.1

TEENpup has MU's MUPPY webcam app but it doesn't see it.

3.01 does not appear to have a webcam app.

Here are the specs from my webcam ...

USB Viewer highlights it is red and says:
-------------------------------------------------
USB2.0 Web Camera
Mfg Vimicro Corp
Speed 480Mb/s (high)
USB Version 2.00
Device Class 00(>ifc)
Device Subclass 00
Device protocol 00
Maximum default endpoint size 64
Number of configurations 1
Vendor ID 0ac8
Product ID 0323
Revision number 1.00
MaxPower Needed 500mA

According to this site SuSE 10 may be able to handle this Web cam: http://www.unixadmintalk.com/f61/usb-web-cam-247289/

This site lists two ViMicro Web cams as supported in Linux:
http://www.linuxtv.org/v4lwiki/index.php/Webcams

Quote:
spca5xx * Supports webcams based on Sunplus Sonix Transvision Z-star/Vimicro chips

# zc0301 -- included in the kerne * Supports Z-Start/Vimicro ZC0301-based USB cameras

[edoc]

I then installed the xawtv-3.95.pup from http://www.moyo.me.uk/pupplinux/xawtv-3.95.pup

Just got to this step and ran into this:

Not Found
The requested URL /pupplinux/xawtv-3.95.pup was not found on this server.

Is this .pup available elsewhere?

[muggins]

mu has a .pup here:

http://dotpups.de/dotpups/Multimedia/pu ... v-3.95.pup

[edoc]

Tried both commands to this result, guess I need a different driver.

sh-3.00# xawtv -noxv
This is xawtv-3.95, running on Linux/i686 (2.6.18.1)
WARNING: Your X-Server has no DGA support.
can't open /dev/video0: No such device
v4l-conf had some trouble, trying to continue anyway
v4l2: open /dev/video0: No such device
v4l2: open /dev/video0: No such device
v4l: open /dev/video0: No such device
no video grabber device available
sh-3.00#

sh-3.00# xawtv -noxv -nodga
This is xawtv-3.95, running on Linux/i686 (2.6.18.1)
WARNING: Your X-Server has no DGA support.
can't open /dev/video0: No such device
v4l-conf had some trouble, trying to continue anyway
v4l2: open /dev/video0: No such device
v4l2: open /dev/video0: No such device
v4l: open /dev/video0: No such device
no video grabber device available
sh-3.00#

Apparently my webcam does not respond to the gspca driver, even though the .
text on the links below suggest that it should.

If anyone hears of a Linux driver compiled for Puppy that handles the Taide webcam
I'd sure like to know about it!

According to this site SuSE 10 may be able to handle this Web cam: http://www.unixadmintalk.com/f61/usb-web-cam-247289/

This site lists two ViMicro Web cams as supported in Linux:
http://www.linuxtv.org/v4lwiki/index.php/Webcams

Quote:
spca5xx * Supports webcams based on Sunplus Sonix Transvision Z-star/Vimicro chips

# zc0301 -- included in the kerne * Supports Z-Start/Vimicro ZC0301-based USB cameras

[muggins]

i've just started playing around with a webcam, (logitech QC chat, 046d:092f), and while i can use gqcam & yava, to display OK, i've yet to work out why xawtv doesn't work.

after you've run:

depmod -a
modprobe videodev
modprobe gspca

then if you run usbview, does it show gspca as being used? also, if you check here for supported devices:

http://mxhaard.free.fr/spca5xx.html

it doesn't indicate your particular productID as among them.

[edoc]

Nope, nothing about gspca in USBviewer

I have to hope that someone picks up on the other drivers I listed and can sort out
how to get them across to Puppy - it's beyond me - plus I have to speak to a group
in the morning and cover the pulpit Sunday so I have to step away from playing with
Puppy and refine my speaking text.