Webcam on Linux, success!

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I have this Trust Mini-Webcam WB-1200p since my younger brother gave it to me as a present for my last birthday. It’s a decent webcam, pity it has a CIF sensor and not a CCD one, but it’s still OK for daily use. Until now there wasn’t a decent Linux driver around, and so I was forced to boot into Windows (which I almost do not use now, save for Final Fantasy XI). Most of the few drivers around had little or no documentation, were binary-only, or looked completely unmantained. Then I took a look at spca5xx again. This driver was born to support the SPCA webcam chipsets (like Creative’s PC-CAM 600) but over the time it grew bigger and now supports a whole load of different cameras.

Ubuntu has an outdated version that doesn’t recognize my camera. I tried first downloading the most recent snapshot from the site, but it threw a bunch of errors after compiling (i.e. it wouldn’t run) I then decided to get the most recent Debian package and install it with module-assistant. And it worked! Finally I can use my webcam on Linux and avoid using Windows even more.